Tony Abbott cites chemistry with Japan but the reaction will be from China
|
Version 0 of 1. In late October 2011, Tony Abbott, the then opposition leader, was kind enough to give me a ride back to Canberra from Cape York, where we’d been doing a spot of remote bush building. On the long plane ride home, Abbott granted an interview where we canvassed his views on a range of topics, including future free trade with Japan and China. During the course of our conversation, which was largely about economic philosophy and principles, it emerged that Abbott was coolish on a free trade agreement (FTA) with China, but warm on a trade pact with Japan. His position, when we unpacked it, wasn’t complicated. It was a simple statement of values. This was all about affinity. Abbott favoured an FTA with Japan because Japan was “vastly more of a market economy” and, like Australia, a pluralist liberal democracy. China would be pursued of course, but this was a more problematic agreement because China was not like us. There were questions “to what extent China is a market economy”. This observation, while self-evident in one sense, was nonetheless a jolt. The prevailing official disposition towards China at the time of our conversation could probably be best characterised as schooled pragmatism. Differences in values and systems, while acknowledged, weren’t laboured in public. Greater economic integration with Beijing was viewed as inevitable, not optional. Abbott’s ambivalence, while mild and proportionate, was explicit. The story ran prominently in the newspaper I then worked for, and Abbott’s remarks were picked up by the Xinhua news agency. Various foreign affairs pundits convened briefly in a tea leaf-reading huddle. Labor promptly accused Abbott of dabbling in rank populism. Abbott’s staff tried to pretend he didn’t say what he’d very clearly said, or if he had said it, he didn’t really mean it in the way I’d construed it. Then Abbott went out the next day to one of his many pre-election events and repeated almost verbatim what he’d said to me, putting the matter beyond doubt. We were back squarely to values and affinity. “I just make the obvious point that it is probably going to be easier to conclude a free trade agreement with [Japan], a fellow market economy and … liberal democracy.” I repeat this anecdote not as personal indulgence but in an effort to plot carefully the story thus far of Abbott and Japan, and China. The values statement of October 2011 was then tempered with a dose of disciplined pre-election pragmatism. The prime minister-in-training made more of a specific effort to project a more positive and non-ambivalent disposition about Australia’s engagement with all comers in the region, including Beijing. Throughout 2012, Abbott conducted a positive pivot on the “Asian century” and found some durable language for the Australia-China relationship which was much warmer on the subject of the FTA, (a Howard government legacy that needed to be seen through to completion) – yet reserving his rights on the primacy of liberal democratic values and vexed subjects such as human rights. Abbott remarked in July 2012 that China should build on its economic achievements by embarking on political reform, making the point the bilateral relationship should move beyond pragmatic economic considerations to the “shared values” space. After the election, against a backdrop of prickly territorial disputes between China and its near neighbours, we’re back in the values space. Japan has been praised early and often. Abbott evidently feels comfortable with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, and enjoys, as he put it on Monday, the “historical resonances” associated with renewing a bilateral economic relationship that began in 1957 under the leadership of a conservative hero, Robert Menzies, and Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi. Abbott in Tokyo was painting himself into history, inserting himself in the narrative of a shared relationship. The dividend of all this affinity and shared values has been a new trade agreement. What you think about this agreement depends entirely on where you stand. If you are a trade expert, conscious of Japan’s long history of fierce and unyielding protectionism of its agricultural sector – it looks like progress. If you are an Australian cattle or dairy producer hoping for a bankable breakthrough on market access, it looks like suboptimal incrementalism – little more than spin and deft window dressing. If you are in the US, you might see Abe looking less at Abbott, and more over the Australian prime minister’s shoulder to the White House, perhaps using the new Australian deal as a template or a public statement about what Japan might agree to on the much bigger play – the trans-Pacific partnership. If you are in China, you might see Abbott’s assertive framing of his new trade pact, the public bonding with Abe, the fresh commitments on defence and security cooperation, the meeting with the Japanese National Security Council, the preferential deal on foreign investment (this development will be of considerable interest in Beijing) – as a message, and not a positive one. The Chinese might view all this pragmatically – seeing the political dance of the past few days as a message from Abe, not so much a specific message from Abbott. A pragmatic response from Beijing might yield a positive reaction to Australia’s new government asserting itself, on its own terms. China might respect the geopolitical play Abbott is currently intent on constructing – or it might bristle and consider it an affront from an upstart from Canberra. Abbott’s next stop after South Korea is China, on Wednesday. It will be interesting to see how the leadership responds to Abbott’s considered pushback against cultural relativism which is now core to his “Asian century” messaging. Abbott is intent on projecting “Australian values” as the norm, the baseline; and feigning a certain degree of ignorance that other nations might see the world rather differently. It’s a message for domestic consumption. Abbott’s telling voters back up that he will defend the national interest. This week, the prime minister has asserted that Australian values (which he defines as democracy, freedom, peace and the rule of law) are “universal” values, when they are clearly not universal values. Aspirations, perhaps, but not yet realities. |