Making a world of difference: Why Penny Wong’s just getting started

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Penny Wong travels everywhere, but she is emphatic that she is going nowhere. “Absurd,” is her response to the recent press gallery rumour that she was on the cusp of quitting.

Australia’s peripatetic minister for foreign affairs has set an intensive tempo. She made as many trips to Pacific Islands states in a month than her predecessor, Marise Payne, made in three years, for example.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

But while the travel might have fatigued her, it has not worn her. She is galvanised by her mission, and she is not seeking a more sedentary portfolio. “Oh no, I’ve wanted this job for a long time,” she tells me.

She’s the most highly regarded politician in the country, on equal billing with Jacqui Lambie, according to a YouGov poll in September. After 21 years in the Senate including 15 in the purgatory of opposition, after the traumatic years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd upheavals, and just halfway through a term as foreign minister, the 55-year-old is just getting started.

There is no one in parliament closer to Anthony Albanese, and he has zero interest in moving her.

And what is her mission, exactly? “We do live in the most competitive region in the world, we know that. We know that. The world, as I’ve said before, the world’s been reshaped and the focus of the reshaping is our region. And so what we have to do is influence that reshaping as much as we can. And we do that by using every element of Australia’s national power,” she said on Monday, in her final working week of the year. “It doesn’t mean we’ll win every time, but we are playing to our strengths to advance our interests in a time of great change.”

In Xi Jinping’s words, the world is going through “changes not seen in a century”. His stated aim is that the People’s Republic of China will emerge dominant. “The West is declining, and the East is rising,” he likes to say.

Penny Wong and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July.Credit: Bloomberg

According to Wong: “Under the previous government, I don’t think Australia was really competing. We’re now competitive.”

How can she say that? The Morrison government conceived and negotiated the AUKUS agreement, appraised worldwide as a change in the global strategic order in favour of the West. Among the major powers, relations with Japan and India were improving markedly as both started hedging against China and building ties with Australia.

The Coalition, charges Wong, “talked tough at home, but they lost influence in the world”.

It is true that Canberra under the Coalition was being outmanoeuvred by Beijing in Australia’s own immediate sphere of influence, the Pacific. China’s security pact with Solomon Islands shocked the country and upset the Coalition’s re-election campaign.

Wong nominates the Pacific first among her accomplishments as foreign minister. She cites Australia’s new security agreements with Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. And the newly created Pacific Engagement Visa, which she describes as “a change in the way in which we engage with the Pacific, playing much more to our strengths”.

Wong made as many trips to Pacific Islands states in a month as her predecessor, Marise Payne, made in three years.

This new category grants permanent residency to 3000 Pacific islanders a year initially, offering them a future in Australia rather than transient working rights.

Wong draws attention to the Albanese government’s work in another critical sphere, South-East Asia. Australia has struck a new strategic agreement with the Philippines, a country in the front line of Beijing’s expansionism, and has started work on implementing the South-East Asian economic strategy mapped out by former Macquarie Bank boss Nicholas Moore.

And while she takes credit for the “stabilisation” of relations with China, Wong refrains from over-claiming. She doesn’t pretend that it’ll be a crisis-free zone, that there’s any settlement of structural differences.

Even as Xi shakes Albanese’s hand, his navy wilfully injures Australian navy divers in a dangerous encounter in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. No country has found a way of defeating such “grey zone” tactics by China, aggressive and physical yet below the threshold of kinetic war.

Nor does Wong claim to have found a solution: “I envision the China relationship as one which will always necessarily require wise navigation of differences… the existence of a dialogue is not of itself going to remove difference, but it will enable us to manage difference better.”

“China will continue being China and continue to assert its interests.” In other words, we should expect dangerously aggressive manoeuvres by China’s military against Australia’s to continue indefinitely.

The best response to Xi’s claims to ownership of the South China Sea and other international waterways, says Wong, is a collective international assertion of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea by all means possible, diplomatic as well as “strategic”, by which she means military.

The overarching aim is to create and maintain a “regional balance” of power constraining Xi’s move to exert hegemony, she says: “A region when no one dominates. No country is dominated and all countries’ sovereignty is respected.”

This is why Labor has pressed ahead with AUKUS, has furthered the intensification of relations with Japan and India, and taken its many other foreign and defence initiatives.

In January, the foreign minister plans a trip to Israel and the West Bank, her first since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. What does she hope to achieve?

“Importantly,” Wong says, she wants to “talk about what happens next, what is the political process which leads – which has the capacity to lead – to lasting peace?”

“There is no path to peace in this region, longer term. If there is not a process towards a two-state solution, I think that this is something the international community, all of us need to support and press.”

Not because she hopes for the Nobel Peace Prize but because an Israel-Palestine problem is an Australian problem. She implicitly acknowledges the stress that the war is putting on Australian social cohesion: “The overriding objective is we want to keep our country unified.”

The world’s problems, one way or another, are Australia’s. And that makes them Penny Wong’s.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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