Australia

United States suspends H1-B and other work visas; United States, EU denounce China over series of cyberattacks; India prohibits state-run telecommunications companies from acquiring Chinese network equipment; EU moves forward with digital services tax despite U.S. withdrawal from negotiations; and Pentagon accuses Huawei and nineteen other Chinese companies of having links to the Chinese military.

Russia's inclusion in an expanded G7 would run contrary to the group's aims and interests.

The pandemic and tensions with China are creating a wedge between Canberra and Washington.

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, declared victory against her country’s coronavirus outbreak last week, stating that “There is no widespread undetected community transmission in New Zealand,” and that COVID-19 had “currently” been eliminated from the country. The country of 5 million people has confirmed around 1,200 cases of COVID-19 and 20 deaths so for, and had no new infections reported diagnosed on Monday this week.  New Zealand ranks among the world's most successful countries in the global fight against the coronavirus, along with Australia, where the daily number of new cases has plummeted from 460 in late March to only 16 last Friday, bringing the total to just over 6,800. Now, the two neighbors are beginning to relax restrictions on movement and economic activity. While their successful efforts to contain the coronavirus can offer lessons for other countries still struggling with major COVID-19 outbreaks, how Australia and New Zealand reopen—and whether they can do so without causing a spike in cases or sparking a political backlash—will be instructive as well. For more on the lessons from these Pacific countries, see my new World Politics Review article.  

This blog post is part of the Women and Foreign Policy program’s interview series on Gender Equality in Foreign Policy, featuring global and U.S. officials leading initiatives to promote gender equality in the defense, development, and diplomatic sectors.

Daniel Flitton is the editor of The Interpreter, a digital magazine published daily by the Lowy Institute in Sydney. When political dramas unfold in real life, they never seem to feature that one crucial moment you commonly see watching a classic emergency room television series. You know—the kind where frantic doctors desperately struggle to revive a patient, pumping his or her chest and charging defibrillators, only to be defeated, and to mournfully mark the precise instant it all came to an end, with lines like “I’m calling it. Time of death, 11:04 AM.” But future historians likely will look back on what has been a scorching Australian summer as the moment Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s previously successful political career flatlined. Morrison is still far from gone, politically speaking. Yet the jolt to his fortunes after his government’s inept response to bushfires that have raged across the country in recent months has clearly hurt his carefully crafted personal brand. The damage to Morrison’s political prospects looks to be permanent, though in unpredictable realm of Australian politics, one can never be sure. Sometimes, moments arrive in politics where reputations are forever tarnished. A relatively newly re-elected George W. Bush, who still had a favorable approval rating in early 2005, found this out later that year after being seen to botch the initial reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Morrison already has suffered a sharp dip in opinion poll ratings after his performance this Southern Hemisphere summer. The reason why such damage may prove lasting is the baggage he brings to his job—a belligerent and highly personalized style that had to date been a great strength, allowing him to be portrayed as a man who takes on the responsibility to get things done. Only in the case of the fires, he seemed to exert no leadership at all, exactly counter to his brand. As the fires ramped up, he literally took a holiday to Hawaii—and was publicly condemned for it. Later, with smoke blanketing many of Australia’s biggest cities and authorities warning people to avoid exercise and the risk to health, Morrison cheerily gathered with the national cricket team by Sydney’s harbor for a photo-op at New Year’s, still appearing oblivious to the depth of public concern about the fires. It had already been revealed he ignored the pleas of prominent fire chiefs in the months leading up to summer about the dangers ahead. When Morrison did eventually visit some communities battered by the fires, he was treated to that most Australian of sarcastic welcomes: “go on, piss off.” Morrison subsequently conceded he made a mistake by going overseas in the days before Christmas. It was a rare concession that he had gone wrong, and one that will open the way for opponents to question his judgment. Morrison never gave an inch, in the past, on almost any political issue, especially during his years as the face of the conservative coalition’s “stop the boats” policy to prevent asylum seekers crossing dangerous seas to Australia. Even when caught in blatant exaggerations related to the asylum policy, he stood stubbornly firm. Later, when in charge of the nation’s finances as treasurer between 2015 and 2018, he marched into parliament brandishing a lump of coal, taunting the opposition in the face of calls to transition the economy from a dependence on fossil fuels. Morrison’s first instinct when taking a holiday during the fire crisis was similarly not to give ground to the critics. His staff sought to cover up his absence—with journalists insisting his office sought to deny that he was even away, only to be discovered lounging on a Hawaiian beach. When Morrison did return, he stumbled further. His awkward appearances and forced handshakes in areas devastated by the fires were broadcast nationally and across the world, and proved a striking contrast to his usual efforts to present himself as an everyman. And the still relatively recent prevalence of smart phones and social media ensured that the scale of the fires—with footage from deep inside the inferno—was seen by the Australian public much more broadly than it would have been even five years ago. Yet Morrison, the supposedly can-do character, responded in a way that was seen to pass the buck, saying, “I don’t hold a hose, mate.” His subsequent decision to produce an advertisement to promote his response to the fires, only for the ad to feature a way to donate to the ruling Liberal party at a time people were reaching into their own pockets for charity, rankled some Australians. In part, Morrison was caught by a confluence of events beyond his control. His Hawaii holiday coincided with the sad death of volunteer firefighters, further amplifying attention on his absence. And people are understandably angry when their house has burned down, and look for someone to blame. A public survey suggested more than half of the Australian population felt affected by the fire crisis—whether by direct property damage, health concerns from smoke haze, or holiday plans upended. Morrison has not only suffered a fall in his own approval ratings, his poor handling of the fire crisis saw him criticized in influential media outlets usually welded to the conservative side. Even from within his own party, state politicians in New South Wales complained about a lack of consultation with and leadership from the national government. The prime minister remains in office. Morrison’s position is now protected somewhat from revolt within his ruling coalition, because it has become far harder to oust leaders from within parties, between elections, thanks to new procedural rules adopted by both parties. The new rules were put in place to end the cycle of continual fighting from within parties, and replacing prime minister after prime minister without elections. Morrison won power in an internal party leadership contest in 2018, becoming the sixth prime minister in a decade, amidst nonstop petty squabbling and personality clashes within the two major political parties. Morrison won a national election just last May, a result not foreseen by most pre-election polls; that victory should have netted him enduring political capital. He now has more than two years until he faces another national election, under Australia’s system of three-year terms. And the country has enjoyed a roaring economy: It has not had a recession in twenty-seven years. Yet the extra-long season of bushfires in the southern and eastern states, which began much earlier than usual in September and came after a long and painful drought in rural districts, not only damaged Morrison’s personal brand but also again focused the public mind on the problem that has loomed in the background of Australia’s recent decade of political strife. That is, the need to craft a credible and durable response to climate change. Indeed, Australia faces the difficult challenge of balancing combating global warming, securing sources of energy for the domestic market, and keeping Australia’s economy booming through exports of coal, gas, and minerals to regional giants like China, Australia’s biggest trading partner. Even if he can right his personal brand, Morrison will continue struggling because of the fundamental divisions within Australian conservative ranks about how to handle environmental challenges. Australia is in many ways the rich country most endangered by climate change. And some parts of the conservative Liberal-National coalition, supported by prominent voices in the business community, wish the government would take the lead on planning for the changes stemming from global warming, and develop a strategy of more ambitious cuts to carbon emissions to limit the dangers. Other portions of the ruling coalition deny climate change exists, or view any focus on climate change as driven by a “cult-like” global green movement to undermine capitalism and hurt the Australian economy. As the crisis built, Morrison spent weeks pointing to Australia’s long past experience with bushfires, refusing to countenance climate change as a meaningful factor that has made fires worse, more devastating, and more regular. Morrison has shown no sign that his summer scare will change his approach or that he will seek to resolve the schism in his coalition on climate change—a schism that undermines policy-making and leaves Australia as a laggard in both climate diplomacy and responses to global warming at home. He insists, to the cost of relations with neighboring Pacific island nations, that Australia only produces 1.3 percent of global carbon emissions, while neglecting to point out that these emissions stem from a country with 0.3 percent of the world’s population. He has emphasized that the fires result from conservation policies allowing too much forest growth—or even arson—with only the barest nod to problems exacerbated by rising temperatures or declining rainfall. As a result, the ruling coalition remains divided, and any progress on climate change in Australia likely remains stalled. Instead, Morrison has attempted to revert to promoting the image of himself as a man of action. He has called out the military to assist with firefighting and clean-up, and pledged to pass legislation to allow the federal government to respond more swiftly to fires in future. “Further practical resilience measures” was the Morrison mantra in a major speech delivered last week in an attempt recapture the political agenda. But this approach continues to treat the symptoms of what troubles Australia, not the cause. Although he faces no serious prospects of being challenged until election time, the public is again eager for substantive action on climate change, and Morrison surely knows from recent history that leaders rarely recover for a second chance.

Warming temperatures mean that Australia will likely continue to suffer from massive bushfires. To reduce future damage, the government must act.

The newest episode of The President’s Inbox is live. I sat down with Charles Edel and John Lee, fellows at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, to talk about the future of the U.S.-Australia alliance. Charlie and John recently penned a report on the challenges facing U.S.-Australian relations as China rises as a global power. Americans and Aussies like to talk about their century of “mateship.” And the two countries share deep political, military, and cultural ties. But when it comes to trade, China is Australia’s number one partner, and it’s not even close. Last year, China’s two-way trade in goods and services totaled nearly AUD$215 billion. That’s nearly three times its two-way trade with the United States (AUD$79.3 billion), and the gap is growing. To be sure, U.S. companies, and Western firms more broadly, have invested far more in Australia than their Chinese counterparts do. Even so, Australians can already feel the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy. It’s only likely to get stronger in the future. Charlie and John worry that Canberra will increasingly find it harder to reconcile the competing demands of its main security partner, the United States, with those of its main economic partner, China. They note that proponents of strong U.S.-Australian ties have a lot of history and goodwill to fall back on. And Canberra has been pushing back against often ham-handed Chinese efforts to interfere in Australian politics. Just last year, Australia enacted “foreign interference laws” to criminalize efforts by foreign governments (think Beijing) to interfere in its politics. But history and goodwill can sustain relations for only so long. Interests matter as well. Whereas Australia’s economic ties with China are deepening, the Trump administration is pushing to de-link the U.S. and Chinese economies. That should give Washington greater freedom to press Beijing on a range of issues. The question is, would Canberra follow along, knowing that Beijing could retaliate economically, potentially plunging Australian firms into the red and costing ordinary Australians their jobs? Perhaps not. Late last month, for example, Australia’s finance minister acknowledged the legitimacy of U.S. complaints about the global trading system but called on the United States and China to compromise in their trade war. Charlie and John argue that keeping the U.S.-Australia alliance on track requires Washington and Canberra to acknowledge where their interests diverge and to be clear about their expectations for each other. That is probably good advice. But it’s easier given than followed. If you are interested in learning more about the debates down under over the U.S.-Australian alliance, you should read Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia, which builds on an earlier essay he wrote, Without America. (White, a professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, has written a synopsis of the book for readers who are pressed for time.) White has been arguing for a while that Australians need to recognize a fundamental fact: U.S. power in Asia is waning and China’s is growing. The trends are so powerful and consequential that Australians “have to accept that we can no longer simply assume that America will, 20 or 30 years from now, be there to prevent any major power from attacking us, or defend us if it did.” White’s book has caused a stir in Australia’s strategic circles. As you can see here, here, here, and here. Some American strategists have also weighed in on White’s general thesis, as you can see here, here, here, and here. Wherever you come down on White’s argument, the trends he points to aren’t going away. Margaret Gach assisted with the preparation of this post.

Australia concludes China responsible for cyberattack; North Korean hacking groups sanctioned; Facebook heads to Washington; and U.S. blacklisting still hurting Huawei.

President Trump and Prime Minister Morrison’s close relationship is good news for the decades-old alliance.

Test your knowledge of Australia, from its system of government to its trade policy.

In elections last month, Australia’s Liberal-National coalition won a surprising victory, defying pollsters who had almost uniformly predicted that the Australian Labor Party would triumph. The coalition’s victory was chalked up, by many, to the unpopularity of Labor leader Bill Shorten, who has since resigned as leader of Labor, and the Australian electorate’s cautiousness—the coalition had overseen continued economic expansion, and Labor had proposed a bold agenda that might have alienated some voters. On domestic policy, the coalition’s victory likely presages continuity on key domestic issues like taxes. Morrison promised tax cuts before the election, for instance and seems likely to deliver them. But the impact of the coalition’s victory on Australian policy toward Southeast Asia is somewhat less clear. In the run-up to the election, as James Curran noted for Asia Unbound, the parties did not seriously debate foreign policy. On China and the United States, two of Australia’s three most important foreign relationships, Morrison seems to have a predictable approach, Curran wrote, but the Liberal-National coalition will find its policies challenged by regional and global dynamics—principally being pulled between the two giants—that could undermine Morrison’s attempt to have a coherent China policy. And in dealing with Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the coalition’s approach seems somewhat more muddled, although there are important reasons for hope. On Indonesia, Morrison is poised to move relations forward, and has already taken steps, since becoming prime minister last year, to solidify ties with Jakarta. In March, Indonesia and Australia signed a major free trade agreement, though it still has to be approved by parliaments in Canberra and Jakarta. This was a landmark in bilateral economic ties, and Morrison also went to Jakarta on his first international trip as prime minister last year. In making Indonesia his first destination for an international trip, Morrison demonstrated the high priority he placed on the Australia-Indonesia relationship, historically a fraught one. Although ties between Canberra and Jakarta cooled briefly last year after Morrison raised the idea of moving the Australian embassy in Israel, Morrison formally recognized West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital yet his administration ultimately opened a defense and trade office in Jerusalem, with little fanfare. The trade agreement, too, helped warm links again between Jakarta and Canberra. In his new term, Morrison is likely to push efforts to upgrade strategic ties with Indonesia, in addition to getting the trade deal passed through parliament. The bilateral relationship, like all of Indonesia’s foreign ties, also probably will benefit from more stability in Canberra, as Morrison’s election and new Liberal Party rules that make internal party spills more difficult should stabilize Australian politics and prevent the revolving chair prime minister problem that, in recent years, has unsettled regional allies. The opportunity for closer strategic relations between Australia and Indonesia certainly exists: As I noted in a Council Special Report last year, the Jokowi administration has become increasingly worried about Beijing’s approach to the South China Sea and other regional challenges. Indonesians overall also have declining favorable views of China. Indeed, Jakarta has moved closer to Canberra’s hawkish views about China’s military assertiveness, although Jokowi needs to woo Chinese investment so badly that he will be reluctant to truly alienate Beijing. Still, there is a substantial chance for Morrison to build on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Australia signed with Indonesia last year, such as by expanding bilateral joint military exercises or making the new Japan-South Korea-Australia-Indonesia exercises a regular practice. Outside Indonesia, admittedly Canberra’s crucial Southeast Asian relationship, the coalition’s policies are less clear. Morrison seems more focused on China, Indonesia, and the Pacific, traditionally an Australian sphere of influence but increasingly an area of Chinese dominance, than on Southeast Asia other than Indonesia. Morrison’s plan for a Pacific pivot is substantial, and he has already moved to make good on the strategy. His approach will balance China’s power in the Pacific, though the coalition’s general lack of action on climate change will potentially undermine Pacific ties. With mainland Southeast Asia, other than Vietnam, it will be difficult for the Morrison administration to convince any countries to go along with Canberra’s relatively tough approach toward China. And Canberra does not appear to have as clear a strategy toward mainland Southeast Asian states as it does toward the rest of the region. I will deal with Morrison’s approach to mainland Southeast Asia in the next blog post.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering May 18 to May 28, was compiled by Rebecca Hughes, Alexandra Bro, and Rebecca Turkington.

James Curran is a professor of modern history at Sydney University. As the dust begins to settle on the stunning, unexpected result from the Australian elections over the weekend, the re-elected Prime Minister Scott Morrison will face once more the challenge of a turbulent strategic environment. Central to that task will be how he manages the relationship with a White House that is increasingly ratcheting up the pressure on Beijing across both the economic and security fronts. Morrison’s win owes much to the ruthlessly clinical scare campaign he ran against Labor leader Bill Shorten’s ambitious agenda for domestic reform, especially his contentious plans for the nation’s taxation system. The result means the prime minister has pulled off a miracle win that virtually no poll or pundit predicted even a few months ago, when the ruling Liberal-National Coalition was reeling from the combination of its decision to dump Malcolm Turnbull as leader and an ascendant Labor party seemingly cruising to electoral triumph. With the changes to party rules now making it much more difficult to remove sitting prime ministers, Morrison’s power within the Coalition appears likely to be impregnable. U.S. observers can be sure that there will be no more revolving doors of Australian prime ministers. During the election the parties’ respective positions on foreign policy were barely audible amidst the din of debate over tax policy and climate change. Such a state of affairs is not unusual for Australia: in the past 60 years only one election has been fought over foreign policy: that of 1966 in the midst of the Vietnam War.  Nevertheless, a troubled world awaits.  Since the 1970s, when both sides of Australian politics began in earnest the policy of comprehensive engagement with Asia, Canberra has been able to conduct its regional diplomacy largely in the knowledge that economic growth and prosperity did not necessarily have to come at the expense of strategic stability. The assumption that U.S. failure in Vietnam would precipitate a U.S. withdrawal from Asia proved a mirage, and when China’s economic rise began to accelerate in the 1990s, Washington retained military predominance in the region. The disruptive elements to this picture have been clear for some time: a United States that, while still active in the region, can no longer call all the strategic shots and is looking for its allies to do more, and a China steadily and intentionally making clearer its goal of achieving regional strategic predominance. Other powers too, especially India and Indonesia, are rising rapidly at the same time, with demographics on their side. Accordingly, the practice of Australian diplomacy has been getting harder. The one constant for Scott Morrison is that, issue by issue, it will get harder still. But according to early press reports there appears to be a palpable sense of relief in Washington that the Morrison government has been returned. Senior U.S. officials have told one Australian scribe that the election result is a bonus for the relationship: ‘We know what we are dealing with’, one said, ‘and we like it’. For his part President Trump tweeted an image of Morrison replete with a series of thumbs-up emoji and a sausage sandwich drenched in ketchup. On one interpretation, such imagery and words are the currency – even if in this case somewhat tawdry – of an alliance built around shared values and enduring bonhomie. A less generous interpretation would be that both Trump’s twittering and the officials’ comments show that the United States retains its longstanding tendency to take Australia somewhat for granted. Washington insiders will need to be careful, however, in jumping to quick or easy conclusions about just how Morrison will react to a U.S. China policy trending increasingly towards containment. This is a disturbing development for Australian leaders and policymakers. One of the nation’s most eminent strategic thinkers, the former head of foreign affairs Peter Varghese, has commented that in the event that trajectory in American policy continues, it would be “very uncomfortable for Australia…we could find ourselves confronting that possibility of having to say no to the U.S. on a matter that it considers to be a core national security interest”. On just which issues Australia would find itself compelled to say ‘no’ to Washington where China is concerned are, of course, not yet clear. But Morrison is unlikely to reverse the policy of both the Abbott and Turnbull governments on conducting freedom of navigation operations within the 12-nautical mile zone of contested territories in the South China Sea. Similarly, his government will continue to eschew the rhetorical armoury that comes with the kind of Cold War thinking articulated by Vice-President Pence in his speech on China to the Hudson Institute in October 2018. In Morrison’s first major address on foreign affairs in November last year, he repeated the call of his predecessors for the “peaceful evolution of our own region”, underlining the importance of U.S.-China relations not becoming “defined by confrontation”. Then, announcing what some dubbed a “Pacific pivot” – aimed at increasing Australian funding to its near neighbors in an attempt to rebut China’s growing influence there – Morrison nevertheless rejected any notion that it should carry a new ‘Cold War’ branding. The first two years of the Trump administration has seen Australia play a strong sentimental card in the bilateral relationship – witness the Australian incantation of “mateship” and military sacrifice as a means of catching the U.S. president’s attention. Morrison will have no trouble in giving renewed voice to those alliance shibboleths. But increasingly Australia, like other U.S. allies in the region, will need to play a different card in managing the alliance with Washington: namely that of the responsible ally that is not afraid to tell its great power protector what it might not necessarily want to hear. And here the task is to advise the United States on the folly of going down the containment path in dealing with China.  It is all very well for Australian governments to utter the soothing words about wanting to see a region still characterised by U.S. leadership. But it needs to make the case to Washington that the key to its ongoing strategic relevance in Asia lies not in recycling cold war dogma, but in Washington improving its own performance in the region. That’s going to be a tough argument to sell to an U.S. president repeatedly asking allies themselves to step up.