[TimorLesteStudies] Book Review: Clinton Fernandes, 'Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy'

Michael Leach mleach at swin.edu.au
Wed Feb 26 09:13:37 AEDT 2020


[Via ETAN]

Australian Journal of Human Rights

ISSN: 1323-238X (Print) 2573-573X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhu20

<https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhu20>Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy
by Clinton Fernandes, Melbourne, Monash University Publishing, 2018, 239
pp., AUD $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781925523799

David Dixon
To cite this article: David Dixon (2020): Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy, Australian Journal of Human Rights,
DOI: 10.1080/1323238X.2019.1683931

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2019.1683931

<https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2019.1683931>Published online: 19 Feb 2020.

BOOK REVIEW

Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy, by Clinton Fernandes, Melbourne, Monash University Publishing, 2018, 239 pp, AUD $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781925523799

Why should readers of this journal be concerned with Island off the Coast of Asia, a book that mentions rights only twice and then in passing? This question can be answered by asking other questions about one of Fernandes’ specific examples: Australia’s mistreatment of Timor- Leste. Why has the Australian Government so often ignored the Australian public’s expressed concern for the rights of the people of Timor-Leste? Why was Australia’s protest about the murders of Roger East, the Balibo Five and Kamal Bamadhaj so feeble that the last of these is likely to be unknown to most readers, even though he was a student at an Australian university? Why is it that, during the period of Indonesian occupation, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) ‘focused its energies inward, on containing Australian domestic opinion rather than outward, on Indonesian behavior’ (102)? Why did Australian intelligence services bug Timor-Leste’s government offices in order to obtain advantage in negotiations over access to oil and gas resources? And why, at the time of writing, is the Australian Government prosecuting a distinguished former intelligence officer and his lawyer for allegedly publicising that bugging?

None of these questions can be adequately answered within our conventional legal, political or human rights discourses, which typically assume that our governments behave rationally through a liberal foreign policy, in which commitment to international conventions on human rights and other matters is expressed and maintained. Fernandes radically revises this perspective. For him, Australia’s foreign policy has a (largely covert) central and dominating commitment to Australia’s financial and commercial interests. Island off the Coast of Asia starts with the insistence that the ‘core ambition of Australia’s external relations is to advance its economic interests in the face of competition’ (1). This argument is carried through the book: ‘[T]he overriding objective of Australian foreign policy is the creation of a favorable investment environment for Australian businesses’ (126).

Fernandes makes this case by re-telling the history of Australia’s foreign policy, from the early colony to current priorities, with detailed reconsideration of the period since World War II. Fernandes’ subtitle is ‘Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy’. These instruments are economic (e.g. trade agreements and investment treaties), financial (e.g. international monetary agreements and foreign aid), legal (e.g. treaties and conventions), covert (e.g. intelligence agencies), and military. His account documents how particular instruments were dominant at particular stages: military involvement in East and Southeast Asia; Australia’s shift in patron from the UK to the US; economic exploitation of colonised countries; Korea, Vietnam, Malaya and Indonesia; the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention; the role of trade law and agreements in the attempts of previously colonised countries to develop (and the attempts of previous colonisers to control and direct such development); free trade and globalisation; the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis; foreign aid; and the rise of China.

For Fernandes, the economic over-determines: ‘The advancement of economic interests and a political order that secures them are enduring goals of Australian foreign policy’ (2). All else has to be seen though this lens. So, for example, ‘“[s]ecurity” means much more than protection from invasion. It is an elastic concept that gives priority to economic interests, and to a political order that secures them’ (2). The example of Timor-Leste shows how economic and security concerns run together. The Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Cth) authorises Australian Secret Intelligence Service operations in the interests of ‘Australia’s national economic well-being’ (127), which apparently justified diverting intelligence services from investigating a terrorist attack on Australia’s embassy in Jakarta to bugging the government offices of a weak friendly neighbour in Dili.

It is true that some of his material is amenable to a less economically founded interpretation. Notably, Australia’s pandering to the US can be seen as political and cultural as well as economic. It is unlikely that Fernandes would dispute this. For example, regarding security in the Middle East, he writes: ‘The organizing principle of Australian foreign policy is to stay on the winning side of the global confrontation’ (46). What his emphasis on the economic does is swing the analytical pendulum to give to the economic the attention that it is due.

Fernandes anticipates accusations that his approach is crudely determinist. He insists that that kind of sub-Marxist theory cannot take account of the directive role of the modern state (193). Far from being some superstructural apparatus, the state is in partnership with commerce. Fernandes documents the elision of the boundary between private and public in the case of Woodside Energy; there is an interchange of personnel between government and corporation. Even more substantially, Fernandes spends a chapter documenting the way in which the resources of the state were deployed to do the preliminary research and development for oil and gas exploration off Australia. At massive cost, geophysical surveys of the Timor Sea were undertaken by Geoscience Australia on behalf of the Australian Government, thereby making possible exploration and exploitation, bringing massive profits to oil companies and substantial oil tax revenues: ‘[T]he public bears the costs and risks of diplomacy, law, investment, research, negotiations, espionage, and other instruments of statecraft, while small groups in control of vast concentrations of capital benefit disproportionately’ (5). Fernandes makes clear that an alternative is available in the example of Norway, which has funnelled the proceeds of its oil not into private hands but into a public fund. This is placed in the context of the negotiations leading to the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention. Far from the desiccated black letter of conventional accounts in international law, Fernandes shows how the legal instrument in Australia’s foreign policy ‘involved long-term coordination at the interface of diplomacy, geoscience, and law’ (5).

Island off the Coast of Asia includes important methodological lessons for human rights scholars: ‘Studies that focus only on the Defence or Foreign Affairs sections of the cabinet papers often miss the underlying rationale for strategic policy and its place in the integrated governmental picture [. . .]. They usually omit domestic economic considerations that motivate external policy, as well as the strong link between foreign economic policy and other foreign and defence policies’ (58). Again, Timor-Leste provides a good example: commentators understandably rely on the conveniently available published collections of official papers on Timor- Leste, but they are partial, in both senses of that word.

A theme in Island off the Coast of Asia is Australia attempting to convince itself that it is more important to the US than it really is. On the US, Fernandes has expanded his discussion in another book, What Uncle Sam Wants. This draws on the WikiLeaks archive of US Embassy cables from 2003 to 2010. While Julian Assange’s legal troubles continue, most attention has been directed to the personalities involved and the related issues of state secrecy and press freedom. Fernandes (2019, 141) goes beyond these to look at what the cables tell us about, as he describes it, ‘a view of a world in transition’, thereby shedding ‘light on ongoing tensions with Russia, US–China relations, Israel, Iran, North Korea, Free Trade Agreements, Intellectual Property Rights, Tax Havens, GVCs, Public Diplomacy, Anti-Terrorist Financing and Climate Change’.

For Fernandes, ‘[p]erhaps the central feature of Australian society is that the most important economic decisions are taken in the private sector, where real power lies. A small number of people drive the decision-making processes of large corporations, which [. . .] decide where to invest and what to produce’ (2). The domination of Australian society by this group deserves full, separate study. However, the claim is hardly contentious in the wake of the 2019 Australian general election, in which Labour’s progressive policies were undermined by Clive Palmer’s $60m wrecking campaign and News Corp’s attack dogs.

Fernandes expresses deep scepticism about foreign aid: ‘The reality [. . .] is that altruism and poverty alleviation are very far from the aims of the program. Rather, the objective is to create a permissive regional and international environment for Australian businesses’ (176). These are harsh words likely to upset those in the sector, unless they appreciate that Fernandes’ target is the Government and its treatment of critics, such as the Government’s attempt to withdraw Aid/Watch’s charity tax status, until the High Court of Australia ruled in Aid/Watch’s favour (182–183), and the cancellation of Forum Tau Matan’s contract with AusAID when it supported Timor-Leste’s case for a new maritime boundary in the Timor Sea (184).

Fernandes is well aware that his approach does not conform to the foreign policy orthodoxy and knows that critics will look to find fault. He responds with a scrupulous academic method, in which every statement is considered and supported by reliable evidence. This is scholarship of extraordinary breadth and depth. Fernandes sweeps authoritatively, accessibly and confidently though military history, development, geoscience, finance, international law and much else. Island off the Coast of Asia is a brilliant achievement. Anyone seeking to understand how human rights are constrained by the economic and political skeleton of Australia’s foreign policy needs to read this extraordinary and important book.

References
Domestic legislation
Australian legislation
Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Cth).
Other references
Fernandes, Clinton. 2018. Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy.
Melbourne: Monash University Publishing.
Fernandes, Clinton. 2019 . What Uncle Sam Wants: U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives in Australia and Beyond.
Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
David Dixon
UNSW Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
d.dixon at unsw.edu.au
© 2020 David Dixon
https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2019.1683931
<https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2019.1683931>AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 3

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