SYDNEY: Australia’s foreign policy is clearly moving away from its focus on Asia during the 1980s and 1990s and is now headed for a more formal alliance with the United States, reflecting the Howard government’s more cautious — even anxious — approach.

In a media briefing last week, a senior Australian Foreign Ministry official indicated that the Howard government’s new ‘White Paper’ on foreign affairs, to be published in two months’ time, will formally announce that Australia’s single most important relationship in foreign policy is its alliance with the United States.

This reflects Prime Minister John Howard’s deep embrace of the United States immediately following the Sept 11 attacks, when he invoked the Australia-New Zealand-US (ANZUS) defence treaty and committed Australian troops to the US-led attack on Afghanistan last year.

The ‘White Paper’ is a policy document, which is usually produced every five years. The last report produced in 1997 ranked the United States equally with Japan, China and Indonesia as countries where Australia had “substantial interests”.

This year’s paper ranks no other country in order of importance to Australia — other than the United States.

Signs of Australia’s shift under Howard were evident even earlier. In 1999, Howard made the infamous comment that Australia could act as America’s deputy sheriff in Asia, and Australia’s role in East Timor’s independence is now increasingly seen as reflecting this strategy.

In recent months, the Howard government has demonstrated its enthusiastic embrace of US President George W Bush’s ‘anti-terrorism’ campaign and its tendency to look at Asia with a military focus.

Australia’s trade with the United States has increased in recent years, but Asia still accounts for 57 per cent of Australia’s total merchandise exports. As a region, Asia remains Australia’s biggest trading partner.

The growing trend of trade with the US trend worries some in the Australian business community, who see this as a sign of a growing bias against Asia in Australia’s foreign policy that may have repercussions for Australian business in the region.

Interestingly, Australia’s focus away from Asia and toward the United States in its foreign policy comes at a time when Asians in greater numbers are coming to Austustralia as fee-paying students, tourists and migrants, as well as asylum seekers.

“Indeed, Australia’s engagement with Asia has been growing substantially, and this can be measured in many ways,” argued Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in a recent speech.

“For example, we have never had more trade with Asia than we do now, or by the substantial numbers of students from South-east Asia at educational institutions in our country, and again we have never had as many Asian students studying in Australia as we do now,” he added.

If this is so, then why the government’s policy shift to move closer into America’s embrace?

“In domestic political terms, it has always been easier to sell ‘anxiety’ than the positive story of engagement, partly because the threat from the north (Asia) is deeply embedded in social memory and partly because anxiety has received a renewed impetus post-September 11,” said Professor David Walker.

Paul Kelly, editor-at-large of ‘The Australian’ newspaper, argues that the problem in Australia’s foreign policy lies in the Howard-Keating cultural conflict of Australia’s identity.

He points out that the draft White Paper does acknowledge that close engagement with Asia is essential to Australia’s future. —Dawn/The InterPress News Service.