Australia, explained.
Troops waiting for helicopter transport outside Saigon during the Vietnam War (Tim Page/Corbis via Getty Images)
Vietnam, PNG and Timor continue to shape Australia’s approach.
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50 years later, are we any wiser? Australia’s search for regional security50 years later, are we any wiser? Australia’s search for regional security
This year brings up four separate 50-year anniversaries, each a reminder of the dilemmas involved in Australia’s search for security in Asia.
1975 was a big year. In April, North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon. In September, Papua New Guinea achieved independence from Australia. In December, Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor commenced. And at home, Gough Whitlam was dismissed by John Kerr in November.
By 1975, eventual North Vietnamese victory over the South was no surprise. 523 Australians had died as part of an ill-conceived and ill-fated American intervention, a casualty figure which is barely a spot on the suffering of the Vietnamese themselves in that war.
It appeared that Australia had blindly followed the United States into the quicksand, misreading a post-colonial, principally nationalist rising as communist expansion.
Except it hadn’t. The war was a mistake, but Australia’s commitment was not blind. Australian leaders themselves misjudged the nature and future of communism in Southeast Asia. Widespread public opposition to Australia’s involvement in the war also came late, and was perhaps never quite so deep run as historical memory now suggests.
The region is messy and ambiguous, and we’ve made some big mistakes.
PNG’s independence was similarly no shock by the time the flags were struck across Australian government outposts, though far too little had been done to prepare the country for independence.
The continuities were significant. Whatever its legal status, Canberra inevitably still viewed PNG as a strategically critical piece of geography. Many Australian officials stayed on, too, with nominally different but functionally similar roles. Basic human development challenges and the construction of a functioning state remained overriding priorities.
Over time, tensions inevitably made themselves known. Could Australia, still heavily financially committed to PNG, let go of the prerogatives that had come with that dominance pre-1975 – what strings would be attached to the dollars? And could Australian leaders see the country, now possessing its own messy, flawed democratic politics, as more than a security liability?
Suharto’s Indonesia occupied East Timor, with great violence, at the end of the year. There were massacres almost immediately. All told between 1975 and 1999, at least 18,600 Timorese were killed or disappeared, with perhaps another 84,200, maybe many more, dead from hunger and illness.
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam holding a koala with Indonesia's President Suharto in Queensland, 1975 (NAA A6180, 11/4/75/153)
Australia’s relationship with Indonesia had already been fraught. Australian soldiers had fought in konfrontasi over the formation of Malaysia at the same time as Australia shared a land border in New Guinea with the new Indonesian state. Australia-Indonesia relations only really started to warm after Suharto’s New Order replaced Sukarno’s regime in 1965, at the cost of perhaps half a million “leftists”.
Whitlam had a role in all of these developments. He formally ended Australia’s role in the Vietnam War and hastened the finalisation of PNG’s independence. His government placed great emphasis on Australia building closer relationships with states throughout Asia, including Indonesia, and envisioned a much-diminished role for American power in the region.
But none of this was as neat or clean as it might seem on first gloss. For one, Whitlam’s position on Indonesia and Timor was that of Fraser, Hawke and Keating who followed him.
Seeking to “ensure that his position on Portuguese Timor was clearly understood”, Whitlam put it “frankly” on record with senior officials in 1974: “I am in favour of incorporation but obeisance has to be made to self determination. I want it incorporated but I do not want this done in a way which will create argument in Australia which would make people more critical of Indonesia.”
Put more plainly, the stability of Australia’s relationship with Jakarta was preeminent. Australia was, as academic Clinton Fernandes has dubbed it, the “reluctant saviour” when eventually acting in 1999.
Moreover, as historian Andrea Benvenuti has written, Whitlam’s desire for post-Vietnam military retrenchment throughout Southeast Asia was far from universally welcomed. Such commitments – be it of American troops in Thailand or Australian squadrons at Butterworth – were still viewed by many regional leaders as a useful bulwark against Chinese power.
In Papua New Guinea, Whitlam’s fitting enthusiasm for independence did nothing to solve the structural dilemmas that would come with its achievement, either for the fledgling nation or for Australian policymakers. He would not, of course, be in office to grapple with them.
Where does it all stand, now?
Vietnam is now a rapidly growing economy, and – if not quite hedging – then keeping partnerships open, a savvy player in renewed US-China geopolitics.
Australia is back providing direct budget support to PNG. There are good reasons for this, though few really seem to believe it will solve the country’s deep and persistent problems. Regardless, our own anxiety, about who might provide the money if Australia doesn’t, runs deeper.
And the talisman of ever closer ties with Indonesia remains alive in Australia’s foreign affairs zeitgeist, as we become ever less important for Jakarta, and while the relationship remains apparently so fragile that honest official histories of Timor need to be fought for.
We cannot dictate terms, not in the Pacific, certainly not in Southeast Asia, and unpalatable compromises have been made. The region is messy and ambiguous, and we’ve made some big mistakes. We can’t change this history, nor can we shift the fundamental challenges we face. Australia’s relative weight in this growing region is decreasing, not building.
That’s not a call to sit things out. It’s simply that if less has changed in the last 50 years than we might have wished, we shouldn’t overestimate how much we can determine in the next half-century. We need to get our own house in order, because the dilemmas aren’t getting any easier.
About the author
William Leben
William Leben is a Senior Analyst at the Development Intelligence Lab and an Expert Associate at the National Security College, Australian National University.
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