In these strange Howard years where policy failures prevail, we have become used to the sidelining of wisdom and experience of people like Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating, former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) head Richard Woolcott, and former Chief of the General Staff Peter Gration.
A less well-known case is Professor Ross Garnaut, author of The East Asian Ascendancy and visionary architect of the 1980s–1990s Hawke–Keating strategy which locked Australia securely into the east Asian economic miracle.
Garnaut is still a person of high standing in Asia, especially in China, and an ANU economics professor with a string of directorships. But these days he spends more time than he should working on his farm near Canberra. So far as the present government and DFAT are concerned, he is pretty much old news.
Garnaut testified two months ago as a private citizen (also representing Bill Carmichael, former Chairman of the Industries Assistance Commission) before the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Treaties under its Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) reference. His testimony on 3 May and supporting written submissions were the most substantive arguments yet presented, from an overall national interest viewpoint, against this proposed FTA.
The Committee completed 11 public hearings on 14 May and was due to report to Parliament by 23 June. It is not clear what impact Garnaut’s testimony, under-reported in national media, may have.
Garnaut’s testimony was important, discomfiting and sad. During the period of the Howard Government there has been such a loss of Australia’s formerly formidable expertise in international trade negotiations, that Garnaut, a committed trade multilateralist, basically had to guide members of the committee through International Economics 101. He introduced the written submission thus:
We [Garnaut and Carmichael] write as two Australians who have had substantial involvement in Australia’s trade liberalisation and in international discussion of trade policy. An important lesson of our experience is that the domestic process through which trade liberalisation is discussed and trade policy decisions are taken is critical to progress in liberalising world trade. Disinterested analysis and wide dissemination of information about the costs of protection was a critical element in persuading Australians that reducing our barriers was in our own interest.
Four years ago, when the idea of an Australia–US FTA was first mooted, Garnaut (Straw Polls, Paper Money by David Love, Viking, 2001) warned quietly that it raised real questions about Australia’s continued progress towards living in a productive