Amid global tensions, Australia looks for regional friends

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OPINION: Penny Wong’s foreign policy is taking on an increasingly different tone from that of her Coalition predecessors, with low-key meetings to cement relationships with our closest neighbours.

Russia moves to annex large swaths of Ukraine, the British pound collapses, Europe confronts a freezing winter with limited gas supplies, Wall Street goes bipolar, and Chinese fighter jets buzz US naval ships in the South China Sea.

The calligraphy contains the following lines from Chinese poet Wang Bo, who was active in the 7th century during the Tang Dynasty: “If the world holds a friend who knows your heart ... The Sky’s End is as near as the next village.”You could get lost in translation, but the meaning is something like distance is no barrier to friendship – a similar rationale to that behind Wong’s push for closer regional ties.

Thailand is Australia’s third most significant trade partner in the ASEAN group, and was the first ASEAN country to join the Australian-led, UN–sanctioned force that ensured some form of stability in East Timor in 1999 as the tiny state chaotically unshackled itself from Indonesian control.

“It was a good example of the sort of co-operation between middle powers that [Penny Wong] was calling for in her [UN] speech,” the participant averred.The Thai-Australian bilateralism forms a model of the building blocks behind a foreign policy that is taking on an increasingly different tone from that of the Albanese Labor government’s Coalition predecessors led by Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison.

A more intriguing historical parallel for Wong’s current efforts is Alf Conlon, who was the wartime Labor government’s architect of a short-lived postwar foreign policy aimed at an ambitious projection of Australia’s influence in the Asia-Pacific region. This elevation of an Indigenous voice in Australian foreign policy may be dismissed as largely symbolic, but it is taking place at the same time as the Australian War Memorial governing council has agreed to depict frontier violence between Indigenous people and European settlers in the 19th century.

 

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