Refreshingly, Julia Gillard chalked up a major foreign policy success this week in China. She has put Australia-China relations back on the positive track trailblazed by Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke many years ago.
Hawke's respected presence on her delegation emphasised this historic continuity: a point she made several times in her important Boao Forum Speech on 7 April at the start of her visit
She did not mention human rights in the speech. Nor did she mention Kevin Rudd. It is a paradox that Rudd — who certainly knows far more about China than Whitlam, Hawke or Gillard do — did not realise his opportunities as PM to enrich the relationship. We can see in retrospect that he deeply irritated China by lecturing them on human rights and by his needlessly provocative language on US-China strategic competition in Asia.
The Rudd years, like the Howard years, were years of stasis, even regression, in Australia-China relations. We aimed high — and sometimes convinced ourselves we were doing well — but Australia never actually managed to get the delicate economic relations/strategic /human rights mix right.
It was not for want of trying on the part of many knowledgeable Australian officials and former officials with expertise in China — people like Stephen Fitzgerald, Ross Garnaut, Richard Rigby and Hugh White. The difference now is — the Australian PM was this week acting on good advice.
In her Boao speech, Gillard made this crucial observation — couched in general language not naming any country, but the meaning would have been as clear in Washington as in Beijing:
We must also understand that continued and strengthened economic growth will keep changing the strategic order of our region. Militaries are modernising. Economic growth will put more pressure on energy, water and food resources. This does not make major power conflict inevitable — all countries in the region share a deep interest in strategic stability — but the consequences of conflict are ever more severe for us all.
Those historic words — they must have been hard fought over in Canberra — mark the end of Australia trying to have it both ways: to enjoy the fruits of a thriving trade and investment relationship with Beijing, at the same time as standing four-square with US aspirations — increasingly problematical — to contain the steady growth of Chinese strategic power in the Asian region.
With the beginning of the end of our mineral resources export