The Adolescent Country

Not always. Australian leaders have managed broadly to keep some of the essentials of its international affairs in good order: the trade routes open, investment flowing, the US alliance in good condition, relations with the great Asian capitals of Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul intact, the terrorists at bay. No one is massing an army against Australia. But measured against its potential today and its needs tomorrow, Australia is seriously underperforming and it is underperforming because of the pathology of parochialism. In a choice between big national interests and smaller local ones, its leaders, its political class and its media very often give reflexive priority to the smaller. Australia has been wasting valuable opportunities to strengthen its position in the world at the time of the greatest power shift in Asia-Pacific geopolitics since the Second World War.

Managing Australia's global interests is demanding and time-consuming for the national leadership. In the second half of his eleven-year term, John Howard devoted most of his prime ministerial time to international policy, according to his then chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos. Even a single initiative can consume an enormous amount of leadership attention. Kevin Rudd estimates that in the months he worked to turn the G20 into the crisis manager of the global financial disaster of the early twenty-first century, he spent about a third of his time on the project.

But while it is a core responsibility of the national government, a leader gets scant political credit for successful international policy. And at the end of every overseas trip, there is always the snide 'welcome home' from the media – faux outrage at the cost. Billions are casually tossed about in stories on government spending, yet when it comes to Australia's foreign policy a million is suddenly a shockingly large sum.

Australia has worked hard to overcome what historian Geoffrey Blainey called 'the tyranny of distance' and become one of the world's most globally connected countries, but it still displays a provincial reflex; the pretence that it is a country without overseas interests. John Howard, obliged to defend his travel spending, argued that it was an unavoidable part of his job: 'I have had to do a lot of travel, and people who criticise that . . . I'd ask them to point out which trips were unnecessary.'

No one does. It is always easier to assert a higher priority. 'Kevin 07 has become Departure Gate 08,' editorialised The Daily Telegraph on 12 September 2008:

Which wouldn't be a bad thing, except for the PM's dramatic absence from local areas of importance. Sydney's west has seen businesses shut down and mortgages foreclosed as the economy stumbles, but so far this year it's only seen the PM once. This is an engine room for NSW we're talking about, yet Mr Rudd has spent more time in Japan. People are starting to talk.

Which people, exactly? The editorial did not explain.

Japan, in Tele world, is a trivial economic interest. In the real world, it is Australia's second-biggest market, accounting for almost one dollar in five of everything that Australia sells to the world, or just under $50 billion worth in 2013. Its firms have invested a total of $123 billion in Australia, six times as much as China's, and support tens of thousands of jobs in Australia.

Three days after the Tele scolding, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The most serious global financial crisis since the Great Depression was unleashed. Even as parts of the Australian media reported this calamity of capitalism as it enveloped local markets, the Tele clung to its wilful parochialism. Two weeks after the 'Departure Gate 08' editorial, it ran another, headlined: 'Time to Clip Rudd's Wings.' The editors sounded very cross with the prime minister: 'Kevin Rudd's travel addiction is getting out of hand. There are Qantas pilots who rack up fewer air miles. The man needs an intervention.'

The global crisis destroyed half the value of all Australian shares and put a quarter of a million Australians out of work. The worldwide financial cost was $US50 trillion in lost asset values, the equivalent of the total output of the world economy for a year, according to the Asian Development Bank. The International Labour Organization estimated that 29 million people were thrown out of work worldwide.

In response, Rudd took action at home by guaranteeing bank deposits and borrowings and enacting stimulus. And internationally he lobbied to inaugurate G20 leaders' summits that, in Washington and then in London, stabilised the disaster. The London G20 summit of April 2009, in particular, is regarded as the event that arrested the collapse that had been, until then, unstoppable. Two experts at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Colin Bradford and Johannes Linn, wrote that 'in coming years, the London G20 summit will be seen as the most successful summit in history.'

Britain's then prime minister Gordon Brown, the summit's chairman, said that it almost did not happen: 'The G20 hadn't yet been properly constituted.' Until its inaugural leaders' summit in Washington to discuss the crisis it had been a forum for finance ministers. 'There had been some discussion of whether there should be a G8 plus 5, or a G plus another number of countries, and a lot of suggestions did not include Australia, of course,' Brown told the author. 'I was the one who negotiated it with George Bush. I had pressed for the G20 – obviously that was in Kevin's interests because he wanted Australia to be part of it.' Rudd got his wish and 'played a major part in bringing people together and making it a success,' according to Brown. Until that point, 'the world was probably heading for as bad a set of problems as we saw in the Great Depression.'

Did this make the least impression on the provincial reflex? Of course not. Rudd was obliged to defend his travel bill just as John Howard had been, pointing out that it was central to his job. The Daily Telegraph was not the only one, just the first. The Sydney Morning Herald joined the sport later the same year: 'The jokes about Kevin 747 have transmuted into reality,' the paper editorialised. 'The caricature has become fact. The man who made the biggest promises about the environment during last year's federal election campaign has become the man with the biggest carbon footprint in Australia.'

Soon after, the Herald Sun in Melbourne weighed in with that hardy perennial, outrage at the cost:

Kevin Rudd has splurged close to $3.4 million on overseas travel since coming to power, making him one of Australia's most extravagant jet-setters. The globe-trotting PM has racked up one overseas trip every month on average – and spent close to one in six days on foreign soil.

The federal parliamentary travel allowance system was flawed and remains so even after the Abbott government overhauled it. A number of politicians were exposed for sneaking in private trips as official business. But prime ministerial travel to deal with other governments, with reporters covering every leg, is hardly a sneaky junket or a private indulgence. Especially so when there is an unfolding crisis. It is the very reason that official travel exists.

Rudd was scathing on the provincial reflex: 'It's like so many of the debates in Australia, it's couched as a zero-sum game – you can't have an activist foreign policy at the same time as an activist domestic reform policy,' he said in an interview for this paper shortly before returning to the prime ministership in 2013.

Zero-sum-ism is a deep malady in Australian politics. But foreign policy becomes domestic and external becomes internal. For God's sake, in a country with a million people overseas at any given time, we have a deep interest in engaging. The truth is that foreign policy and what we sell to the world are core national interests and anybody who pretends otherwise is engaging in a tawdry political exercise. Zero-sum-ism is not only analytically flawed – you can be active on both fronts, domestic and foreign – it also undermines Australia's national interests.

Yet, finally, Rudd himself succumbed to 'zero-sum-ism'. He should have been at the 2013 G20 summit held in St Petersburg, as Australian prime minister and a major proponent of G20 leaders' summits, but he chose to call an election for the same week instead. It was a moment of profound frustration for him. Not only could he not attend an event he had pushed for, it meant that he would not be there to receive the chairmanship. It was to be Australia's turn to chair the forum and host a year-long calendar of G20 events culminating in the November 2014 leaders' summit in Brisbane.

It should have been a crowning achievement, a moment when Rudd's intense global diplomacy paid a return in domestic politics. He agonised over the choice. He had alternatives. He might have chosen to call the election on one of the Saturdays before or after 7 September. But, in the event, he felt boxed in by the pressures of domestic politics.

Rudd sent his minister for foreign affairs, Bob Carr. It was a poor substitute. Every other member of the 20, bar Saudi Arabia, sent its head of government. The 89-year-old King Abdullah was ailing and could not travel. But the United States' Barack Obama, Argentina's Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Brazil's Dilma Rousseff, the United Kingdom's David Cameron, Canada's Stephen Harper, China's Xi Jinping, France's François Hollande, Germany's Angela Merkel, India's Manmohan Singh, Indonesia's Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Italy's Enrico Letta, Japan's Shinzō Abe, Mexico's Enrique Peña Nieto, South Africa's Jacob Zuma, South Korea's Park Geun-hye, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the EU's Herman Van Rompuy and the host, Russia's Vladimir Putin, were all there.

Not only did Carr fail to make any impression on behalf of Australia as incoming Chair, he even failed to materialise at his own press conference at the conclusion of the summit. The international media were there; the Australian foreign minister, inexplicably, was not. 'Australia Leaves G20 Without a Word,' was the headline that Sky News put on the story.14 The anticlimax seemed to confirm Julie Bishop's opinion of Carr as 'the ultimate accidental minister for foreign affairs'. With Rudd absent and Carr mute, it was an abject symptom of the triumph of domestic politics over Australia's global responsibilities. Even ones that it had helped to create.

Rudd claims to have had an ambitious five-part plan that he had wanted to take to the G20, whose members encompass 80 per cent of the world economy. The G20 had arrested the collapse of the world economy in 2009; now Rudd wanted it to restore it to health. The five points according to Rudd? Coordinate a green energy revolution, instigate a new agricultural revolution, increase efforts to raise people from poverty, boost the participation of women in the workforce, and urgently revive the long-paralysed new round of global trade liberalisation.

But in the haste and confusion of Rudd's return to the prime ministership and his rush to the polls, the plan was not developed. Rudd did not raise it with his ministers or with other G20 members. It silently withered and died. In the contest for attention between the revival of the world economy and domestic politics, there was no contest at all. The world economy lost. It was an example of the fatal weakness of the Rudd prime ministership; as he sometimes remarked to staff in his first term as prime minister: 'We are policy rich and execution poor.'

Again and again, political exigency trumps national interest. When Gillard's trade minister, Craig Emerson, conceded in April 2013 that the government had given up on the possibility of a comprehensive free-trade agreement with China after eight years of negotiations, it was hard to fault Julie Bishop's critique:

That's a blow to Australia's exporters. Craig Emerson has been spending all his time on Sky News defending the prime minister. They are so focused on internal political affairs that they have not taken a cohesive approach to foreign policy and trade issues.

Emerson had become the daily, all-purpose media spokesman for the Gillard government. As a consequence he was quoted or mentioned in the media 41,755 times in the first seven months of 2013, according to data supplied to the author by iSentia. That made him even more heavily reported than the scandal-ridden Craig Thomson MP. Very few of the media references to the trade minister had anything to do with trade.

Former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby pointed out the cost of Australia's failure: 'The game has changed. Australia was the first developed economy with which China agreed to start negotiations,' he wrote in The Australian.

At the time, Australia was ahead of the pack and looking to steal a march on its competitors. Eight years later Australia is behind, trying to defend market share in China from competitors enjoying substantial preferential tariff margins.

On taking power, the Coalition made haste to make amends. Prime Minister Abbott set out the goal of concluding trade deals with the three big powers of Northeast Asia – China, Japan and South Korea – within 12 months. The government succeeded in sealing trade liberalisation deals with Japan and South Korea on time; in late 2014 it was still negotiating with China with a view to a new deadline of the November G20 summit in Brisbane.

It is past time for Australia to give up its provincial reflex. It marks us not as a mature participant in global affairs but as an adolescent country. I will argue here that we cannot continue to see foreign policy as the continuation of domestic politics by other means. I will argue that international policy matters deeply to Australia, especially considering the problems with which the planet confronts us. I will point to the times when Australian leaders have risen to the challenge and have helped to shape the world rather than passively waiting for the world to shape Australia. This is the choice and the challenge that Prime Minister Abbott faces today. As I will argue in the final chapter, there are signs that he is maturing from unpromising beginnings into the 'grown-up' leader he had promised the electorate. If he can truly outgrow the provincial reflex it may well be the making of him and a serious advance for our country.