Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Wong worked on all these herself. In the conference room of her Adelaide office she would sit across the desk from Behm, who recalls, ‘She will fight every bloody sentence and every word if she needs to. She owns her own thinking. She battles it out.’

  In the interests speech she set out, as Gareth Evans had urged her, to articulate and define the national interest. These were, she said, ‘the security of the nation and its people; economic prosperity, enabled by frameworks that allow Australia to take advantage of international economic opportunities; a stable, cooperative strategic system in our region anchored in the rule of law; and constructive internationalism supporting the continued development of an international rules-based order.’22 This was largely the framework articulated by Evans, but Wong had changed his language in a significant way. What he had described as ‘good international citizenship’ had become ‘constructive internationalism’ – a more precise term adopted for these less optimistic times. The logic, Behm says, was that in disruptive times it is hard to tell what ‘good’ means; much easier to see whether something has been constructive or not.

  She then picked up on each element in turn. Wong broadened the conventional understanding of security to include not only defence and counterterrorism but also economic and financial security – issues such as ‘quality child-care, affordable healthcare and the secure prospect of a dignified retirement … In a disrupted world, security concerns are expanding in their scope. People remain worried by war and the threat of war. But they are also increasingly worried by the political and social impacts of growing economic inequality.’

  To increase economic prosperity, Wong argued, Australia should be working towards a cooperative relationship between China and the United States. Integral to this was an open trading system. Labor would eschew Trump’s isolationism. For middle powers, a rules-based system was essential to security and economic interests, she said. She quoted Gyngell’s comments about the danger of lingering in the slipstream of superpowers, and signalled an activist approach. ‘Convergence of interests doesn’t just happen. It has to be worked at.’ This meant working on not only multilateral and bilateral defence but also the relationship in every sector of society – trade and political consultations, as well as people-to-people connections through education and tourism. Development assistance to the Asia-Pacific was crucial: ‘Cuts to development assistance not only worsen the lives of people living in poverty but contribute to instability – with consequences that impact on the stability of development assistance recipients and on our security interests more generally.’

  As for constructive internationalism:

  The most effective response to disruption … is to deal with it actively and constructively, working in concert with like-minded nations while identifying and managing, as well as we can, the sources of disruption … While this might appear, at one level, to be an expression of morality, it is in fact an expression of enlightened self-interest. For nations such as Australia, playing as we are in the second eleven of economies but with global interests, constructive internationalism is a core national interest that delivers fundamental security and economic benefits.

  She concluded by again asserting that Australia should be bold – it should seek to set the agenda ‘modestly but confidently’.

  The ‘values’ speech confirmed that Labor would pursue ‘a transformation in foreign policy’. This meant, Wong elaborated, a policy that was informed by values while pursuing national interests. ‘Values define who we are. Values guide our behaviour as individuals and as nations, determining the moral compass that is as necessary for national leaders as it is for the individual.’ She referred to her maiden speech, all those years before, and her description of compassion as the ‘core value’. She had not changed her mind, she said.

  So what were Australia’s core values? Democracy was ‘a political practice’ rather than a value. It relied on the rule of law applying to all citizens. But ‘at the core of the values to which we as Australians adhere’ was ‘the intrinsic worth and dignity of each person by virtue of their basic humanity – their fundamental right to exist, to live a life of worth and fulfilment, to chart their own course through life and to pursue happiness’. This, she said, was what the rule of law meant, and from where it drew its legitimacy.

  The foreign-minister-still-in-waiting combatted the notion that values were a ‘kind of stalking horse’ behind which ‘“the West” … seeks to assert and defend a form of political dominance’. She used her own heritage in a manner no previous Australian shadow foreign minister could have done:

  Just as my family inherited two cultural traditions, so too did it comprehend two religious traditions, Christianity and Buddhism, both of them traditions which situate the individual in the context of family and community. Values underpin the common experience of humanity … there are common threads such as community, respect, hospitality, honour, care and dignity, the observance of which depends on a fundamental acceptance of human worth.

  The idea that defending human rights is a Western notion, or part of neo-colonialism, is often suggested when the human rights record of countries of our region is brought into question. Wong’s personal background meant she was uniquely able to combat it.

  The worth of each individual human was the basis, she said, for the rule of law, and therefore the international rules-based order. ‘The alternative to a values-inspired foreign policy is a purely power-based foreign policy … The twentieth century is littered with examples of the failure of power-based foreign policy.’

  In her speech about Australia’s relationship with the United States, Penny Wong reiterated the centrality of the rule of law. Behm describes this address as one of the most radical ever given on foreign affairs – but it was almost entirely overlooked by the media at the time. ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘The Americans understood what she was saying, loud and clear.’

  The traditional convention of Australian politicians’ speeches about the US–Australian partnership is to begin with the ANZUS Treaty as foundational and express gratitude for the defence provided by our great and powerful friend. Wong didn’t mention ANZUS until more than halfway through. Instead, she laid out an alternative understanding of the relationship’s foundation: constitutionality and the rule of law.

  Wong went back to 1770, when Captain Cook sailed the Endeavour into Botany Bay, with a New Yorker, James Matra, as one of his midshipmen. Our two nations’ histories were linked, she asserted. She did not use the term ‘kindred offspring’, the term once used to describe the parallels between Australia and Borneo, her countries of origin, but she was talking about that idea: the United States and Australia as progenies of the British colonial endeavour. ‘The decision taken by the government of George III to establish the colony of New South Wales owed much to the American Revolution,’ she noted. ‘The loss of the American colonies meant that the British government had to find somewhere else for the pickpockets, poachers and political prisoners.’

  She tracked forward through the American presence at the gold rushes, and referenced US businessman Herbert Hoover, who arrived in Albany in 1897 and soon persuaded his principals in London to establish the Sons of Gwalia mine – which survived into the twenty-first century and at one point was Australia’s third-largest gold producer. She spoke of the trade relationship: despite China’s dominance in bilateral trade, in terms of two-way investment the United States was Australia’s top partner.

  But more important were the countries’ links through their constitutions. Britain had no written constitution, but on opposite shores of the Pacific, constitutions went ‘to the core of how Australia and the US organise our democracies and shape our political lives’. This, she said, was ‘a foundation of our continuing partnership’.

  It was in this context that Penny Wong finally mentioned ANZUS. ‘The salient feature about alliances is this: they are not about warfare. They are about common interests.’ She called for the operating principles of t
he ANZUS Treaty – consultation and action – to apply not only to defence but ‘across the entire bilateral relationship’.

  What did the Americans understand from this speech? According to Behm, they got the message that ‘its importance notwithstanding, ANZUS does not define our relationship with you. We are about more than that.’

  The pair to this address was one on China. Evans had urged Wong to view China as not necessarily a threat. Behm says: ‘China is growing its power. It’s finding it difficult to grow its authority. And when it can’t have authority it’s a bit inclined to lash out and be a bit ham-fisted and actually act against its own interests.’

  Evans says today that China’s challenge to the international order can be overstated. In his view, China is busy asserting its right to be not only a rule-taker but also a rule-maker. ‘But it doesn’t mean it wants to tear up the entire system. That just means that it wants to be part of the rule-making process.’ The main ‘barefaced challenge’ to the rules-based order, he says, is China’s aggression in the South China Sea. But even there, he points out, the lack of regard for international rules relates to both sides. The United States has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, under which international courts adjudicate competing claims in the area. Evans believes the threat China poses in the South China Sea must be addressed, but ‘it’s at least as much the responsibility of the Americans to accept the reality of China’s rise and not try to exercise … a dominant role in the region’.

  Wong, at least initially, was optimistic about China. Behm sees her heritage as important here. Raised in Chinese culture, she has an inherent respect for it. ‘She understands what China has achieved. She understands what China’s priorities are.’ In the China speech, Wong called for a ‘step change’ in engagement with Asia – ‘not tinkering, not gradualism, but a fundamental whole-of-government, indeed whole-of-nation, effort to deepen and broaden our engagement with Asia … If we want to get it right with Asia, we need to get it right with China.’

  She described the ‘binary thinking’ of the economic and security worlds, ‘each of which is populated by disparate groups, each with their particular mindsets, that either talk past each other or simply do not connect at all’. Labor’s policy, she said, would not start or finish by deciding between China and the United States, but instead by ‘continually deciding for us’. ‘For those who remain attracted to the linearity implied in the so-called “inevitability” of a choice between Washington and Beijing,’ she noted, ‘let me remind them that a disrupted world is non-linear, and for that reason it is not only option-rich, it is choice- and decision-rich.’23

  In these two speeches Wong had announced an intention to transform both of Australia’s key international relationships, and to chart its own course – seeking to escape the dangerous slipstream.

  Wong’s acclaimed address in Singapore at the beginning of 2018, bringing many of these foreign policy ideas together, was both a continuation and introduced new elements. She revisited the ideas of national interest and values, and the rule of law. But her earlier optimism about managing the relationship with China was tempered. She emphasised that China differed from Australia on many values – most significantly, it was not a democracy. Nevertheless, she said, Australia would deal with China ‘on the basis of respect, not fear’. In later addresses, Wong’s optimism about the relationship with China had further decreased. In 2018, she issued what could be interpreted as a caution to China:

  We should be consistent and clear about our support for multilateral and transparent trade arrangements. We should be clear that Australian sovereignty is beyond politics and never up for negotiation. We should respect the role China has in the region. So, too, we should expect China to respect the core elements that define the characteristics of a stable, peaceful and prosperous region.24

  By the time of the 2019 election campaign, she was acknowledging that it would get more difficult, not easier, to manage.25 In the final interview for this book she stated that, while China’s clear desire to be among the rule-makers was reasonable, it was unclear how fundamental the changes it wanted to the international rules-based order would be. In notes she wrote in preparation for her Q&A appearance she said that both the United States and China were ‘in different ways … challenging the status quo. This means the playbook of the last decades isn’t fit for purpose.’ A stable and prosperous region would mean ‘a multipolar region in which the US remains deeply and constructively engaged, in which China is a positive contributor and in which there is broad support amongst the countries of the region for these rules and norms’.

  The new element here – a change of emphasis rather than of approach – was the role of the rest of the region. Perhaps it was in fostering this that Australia could take the initiative.

  So much for the intellectual foundations of foreign policy. What would Penny Wong’s policy stance have meant in action, if she were foreign minister? What will Labor’s attitude be as the Morrison government deals with the challenges? What, for example, would be the response if the United States wanted support for a military freedom-of-navigation operation in the South China Sea, or for Australia to join a coalition taking military action against Iran?

  Wong was understandably constrained in answering questions about these matters in our interview. There is no such thing as a dialogue with only the Australian readers of this book. It will be read by allies and rivals internationally.

  But, reading between the lines of what she says, it is clear she would be pragmatic. She would not make the decision until it was necessary to do so. There would be no blanket guarantees or statements of ‘all the way with the USA’. Australia would ‘decide for us’. The ghost of this approach was seen in her interview with Fran Kelly when asked about military action in Iran. No request had been received. No further comment needed to be made.

  She would identify the national interests in play. In the South China Sea, she would ask what other countries more directly affected – Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea – were doing. This would be a determining part of the context in which Australia’s decisions would be made.

  Wong says she thinks too much emphasis can be given to the tensions in the South China Sea. They tend to be symbolic for China hawks and doves (another unhelpful binary). But at some point, she thinks, there is likely to be a flashpoint, an occasion that will require the countries of the region to make their support for freedom-of-navigation explicit. Rather than thinking of this in terms of US-led action that Australia might be called on to join, she emphasises the importance of action by those regional states that have a direct stake in the territorial disputes.

  Action by such regional players might not be military. In 2016, Indonesian leader Joko Widodo sailed to the Natuna Islands and held a cabinet meeting in waters where his nation’s interests and rights overlap with China’s. The move was described by Indonesian officials as the strongest message the nation had sent to China – but there were no soldiers, no sabre-rattling, no obvious increase in tension.26

  According to Wong, ‘The question ultimately is how do you shape China’s behaviour? And we’re all searching for that. My instinct is that you don’t shape China’s behaviour only by Australia and the US doing something. I think China’s behaviour needs to be shaped by a recognition that there are other countries in the region who support the law of the sea and freedom of navigation.’

  As for action against Iran, she says Australia’s interests are served neither by military escalation nor by a nuclear-armed Iran. We should support attempts to find a way through under the present deal whereby Iran limits its nuclear ambitions in return for a lifting of trade embargoes.

  But, should push come to shove, it is clear that Wong would not necessarily support joining US military action. She refers to the history of wars in the Middle East, and the fact that Labor opposed Australia’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq, which was ‘the right call’
.

  Other commentators suggested in interviews for this book that if a Coalition government wanted to support aggressive US action in the South China Sea, it could be expected to lead to a dispute in shadow cabinet. Richard Marles, the deputy leader and shadow minister for defence, would want to support the United States. So would other figures on the Right. Wong, on the other hand, might favour a different approach. The outcome would be unclear. Asked about this, Wong simply says, ‘You know I won’t talk about that.’

  Penny Wong’s final speech on foreign policy before the election was given at the Lowy Institute at the beginning of May. It was in some ways more partisan than is normal for foreign affairs, perhaps not surprisingly given the election context. She accused the government of damaging the perception of Australia in the region by refusing to preference One Nation last, thus reviving memories of the White Australia policy. She spoke about the main foreign policy plan Labor was taking to the election – a FutureAsia program that included support for improving Asian capacity in business and increasing education in Asian languages.