Australia's Post-War Relationship with Neighbouring States

Prior to the Third World War, there existed a rough parity of forces between Australia and its neighbours. Although Australia was substantially richer on a per capita basis than any of its neighbours, with a two-to-one gap between Australia and the richer member-states of the South Pacific Confederation, and still larger gaps with the rest of its neighbours -- Fiji, the Solomons, New Guinea, the East Indies, and Indonesia -- that gap was narrowing.

Indonesia’s transformation into a regional power of note, with its sizable Javanese industrial base, its million soldiers under arms, and the Borneo nuclear missile silos, was the most worrisome phenomenon for Australian foreign policy makers into the early 1980’s. Although Australians were worried by the rapid growth of Indonesian exports in manufactures, and by the growth through immigration of an Indonesian community in North Australia, it was the 1971 invasion of Malaya and the subsequent pogroms against ethnic Chinese and Indians that decisively turned Australian public opinion against Indonesia. Likewise, the switch of Indonesian allegiances from the League of Nations in 1972 to the United States alliance system, and the subsequent growth of tensions throughout southeastern Asia, disturbed many Australians.

Australia’s other neighbours, of course, were far less threatening. Relations with the South Pacific Confederation and that union’s member states, for instance, were quite cordial after independence from France in 1972. Despite the language and historical factors separating the two federations, the pluralist democratic political systems and middle-class economies of both Australia and the South Pacific Confederation made the bilateral relationship between Canberra and Nouveau-Grenoble one of equals. Although the outlying member states of the Confederation (Tonga and Samoa in particular) were rather poor, exporters mainly of raw materials and emigrants, the trade of the leading member states of the Confederation (Nouveau-Dauphiné, Tahiti, and Nouvelle-Calédonie) with Australia was essentially that between First World countries, with Australia’s far larger domestic market providing a much needed market and source of investment for the South Pacific Confederation countries, and South Pacific agricultural and mineral exports fueling Australian industry.

The Australian relationship with bicultural Fiji, the Melanesian Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, heterogenous and vast Papua, and the former Anglo-Australian East Indies (independent since 1969) necessarily remained biased towards Australia. Broadly speaking, the Solomon Islands and the East Indian Federation supplied unskilled labour for the mines and sugarcane plantations of northern Australia, while Fiji provided skilled labourers (mainly Indo-Fijians) and Papua served mainly as a recipient of Australian development aid. Even in these unpromising conditions, though, circumstances were improving. Australian tourism to the beaches of Fiji and the Hindu temples of East Indian Bali grew substantially throughout the 1970’s as air travel became even more inexpensive for Australians, while Australia’s dominant role in the construction functioning Papuan and Solomon Islander states promised to pay off handsomely -- for the native populations and Australian investors -- in the long run.

Barring the intervention of the Third World War, Australia’s northern and eastern neighbours might well have joined with Australia to form some form of regional confederation, an increasingly prosperous and integrated regional economic structure. Even overlarge Indonesia might well have been made over into an acceptable Australian partner. The Third World War, of course, changed this pattern.

• The destruction of Indonesia was well-nigh complete -- by 1985, only some five million people had survived out of a pre-War 1982 population of some 130 million people, and the cities and industries of Indonesia were razed by the "dirty" cobalt-tained Chinese nuclear warheads.
• The East Indies were not targeted, but the fallout and other environmental sideeffects of the decimation of Southeast Asia worsened conditions of famine and rampant epidemic disease that had already taken the lives of half of the East Indies’ population.
• To Australia’s northeast, the subsistence agriculture of Papua and the Solomon Islands had been enough to allow four-fifths of the local populations to survive with Australian food aid, but the past generation of development had been destroyed, while Fiji experienced violent communal riots that were only brought to an end by Australian military intervention.
• The South Pacific Confederation managed to avoid the global famines and epidemics and actually made a profit off of the sale of its surplus food to Japan and Mexico. However, the collapse of all of the Confederation’s trading partners, the end of tourism, and the mass migration of impoverished Samoans and Tongans to Nouveau-Dauphiné left the Confederation in a state of disarray.

For all of its very real problems, Australia was the only country with a large and functioning post-industrial economy for thousands of kilometers in every direction. As the only country in a position to help its neighbours, by necessity Australia was forced to assume a more interventionist role in the region.

In ideal conditions, Australia might have embarked upon its post-Third World War interventionism by moving into Southeast Asia, where the earlier establishment of some kind of civic order could have saved millions of lives. The extreme reluctance on the part of Australians to intervene in any of the former combatants, though, was reinforced by the legacies of the attempted blackmailing of Japan by the nuclear-armed Shandong People's Republic, and Australia stayed out of the former combatant states in Southeast Asia until the establishment of the League mandates in 1986-9. Aside from the dispatch of Australian aid workers -- and on occasion, Australian soldiers -- to the former Indonesian mandates, Australia's most significant intervention was the resettlement of 1.4 million Indonesian refugees in its own territory, giving birth to thriving Javanese immigrant communities in the metropolis of Sydney, and in the states of Queensland and North Australia. Faced with the difficulty of justifying the costs of rebuilding Indonesia to the Australian taxpayer, the Australian national government simply let the League assume those costs.

For different reasons, Australia limited its involvement in Papua, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. The damage inflicted by the Third World War upon the economies of the Melanesian states was indirect, caused mainly because of the collapsing prices of the industrial raw materials and mineral ores that all three countries exported to First and Second World countries. Although Australia did set a limited import quota for exports from the Melanesian states, the most significant contribution of Australia to the well-being of its three northern neighbours apart from the dispatch of the usual quota of aid workers was the establishment of immigrant quotas, in keeping with the Migration Pact. From 1985 to 2000, almost a quarter-million Melanesians -- including fifty thousand Indo-Fijians and one hundred thousand Solomon Islanders -- settled in Australia, most in the east coast Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales.

It was in the East Indian Federation that Australia concentrated the bulk of its attention. With the help of the South Pacific Confederation, Australia embarked upon the daunting task of reinforcing the East Indian federal state, while reconciling all of the potentially separatist East Indian ethnic communities to continued rule from Denpasar and establishing the preconditions for some kind of economic revival. On the whole, despite the 1993 Ambonese intervention and the 1997 Lombok famine, Australia succeeded in this ambitious task at an acceptable financial and human cost to itself..

The establishment, in June of 1998, of the Oceanic Pact -- including as member governments Australia, the South Pacific Confederation, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Guinea, and the East Indian Federation -- signalled a new era in Australian foreign relations. Although the Oceanic Pact only established mechanisms for inter-governmental consultation on such regional affairs as migration, trade, and environmental and defense issues, its creation did signal that a coherent Australian-centred region did now exist. In the long run, the region might become as well-integrated as modern Europe or South America.