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Kevin Rudd's hasty Asian union plan may not work Dr Paul Williams IS KEVIN Rudd biting off more than he can chew with his idea to establish a European Union-type organisation in Asia? Is the Prime Minister hoping Australia becomes a leading player in any new forum? If so, do we risk stretching ourselves diplomatically too thinly as we establish ourselves, according to Rudd's own agenda, as a leading middle power? His Labor predecessors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (both heavily engaged with Asia as prime ministers) are certainly sceptical. Yet Rudd, in some ways, is merely following a long foreign policy tradition among Labor PMs.
(Article continues below) Labor has a proud history of engagement with Asia, and especially China, stretching back to John Curtin's concession that only the United States, and not Great Britain, could assist Australia in the Pacific War. The ALP, in opposition in the 1950s, soon called for the recognition of mainland China as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan. But this was when prime minister Robert Gordon Menzies saw Asia as just a stopover on his way to watch the Ashes at Lord's, and when the Western world shunned the Peoples Republic of China as a communist Red Menace. Gough Whitlam soon took up the China cause and, on winning the 1972 federal election, established diplomatic relations with the PRC and much of the eastern European bloc. Hawke continued Labor's love affair with Asia when he established the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum. But it was Keating who fine-tuned this relationship, with a special emphasis on Indonesia. The point is, these developments in the Australia-Asia relationship were cultivated over a long period of time and after much deliberation. By contrast, it appears Rudd's plan for an Asian Union was thought up and announced so quickly, and without wide consultation, that even revered ex-diplomat Richard Woolcott, given the task of leading the plan, apparently was given just a few hours' notice.
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