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Penny Wong travels everywhere, but she is emphatic that she is going nowhere. \u201cAbsurd,\u201d is her response to the recent press gallery rumour that she was on the cusp of quitting.<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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Illustration by Dionne Gain<\/span>Credit: <\/span> <\/cite><\/p>\n 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. \u201cOh no, I\u2019ve wanted this job for a long time,\u201d she tells me.<\/p>\n She\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n There is no one in parliament closer to Anthony Albanese, and he has zero interest in moving her.<\/p>\n And what is her mission, exactly? \u201cWe do live in the most competitive region in the world, we know that. We know that. The world, as I\u2019ve said before, the world\u2019s 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\u2019s national power,\u201d she said on Monday, in her final working week of the year. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019ll win every time, but we are playing to our strengths to advance our interests in a time of great change.\u201d<\/p>\n In Xi Jinping\u2019s words, the world is going through \u201cchanges not seen in a century\u201d. His stated aim is that the People\u2019s Republic of China will emerge dominant. \u201cThe West is declining, and the East is rising,\u201d he likes to say.<\/p>\n Penny Wong and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Bloomberg<\/cite><\/p>\n According to Wong: \u201cUnder the previous government, I don\u2019t think Australia was really competing. We\u2019re now competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Coalition, charges Wong, \u201ctalked tough at home, but they lost influence in the world\u201d.<\/p>\n It is true that Canberra under the Coalition was being outmanoeuvred by Beijing in Australia\u2019s own immediate sphere of influence, the Pacific. China\u2019s security pact with Solomon Islands shocked the country and upset the Coalition\u2019s re-election campaign.<\/p>\n Wong nominates the Pacific first among her accomplishments as foreign minister. She cites Australia\u2019s new security agreements with Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. And the newly created Pacific Engagement Visa, which she describes as \u201ca change in the way in which we engage with the Pacific, playing much more to our strengths\u201d.<\/p>\n Wong made as many trips to Pacific Islands states in a month as her predecessor, Marise Payne, made in three years.<\/span><\/p>\n This new category grants permanent residency to 3000 Pacific islanders a year initially, offering them a future in Australia rather than transient working rights.<\/p>\n Wong draws attention to the Albanese government\u2019s 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\u2019s expansionism, and has started work on implementing the South-East Asian economic strategy mapped out by former Macquarie Bank boss Nicholas Moore.<\/p>\n And while she takes credit for the \u201cstabilisation\u201d of relations with China, Wong refrains from over-claiming. She doesn\u2019t pretend that it\u2019ll be a crisis-free zone, that there\u2019s any settlement of structural differences.<\/p>\n Even as Xi shakes Albanese\u2019s hand, his navy wilfully injures Australian navy divers in a dangerous encounter in Japan\u2019s exclusive economic zone. No country has found a way of defeating such \u201cgrey zone\u201d tactics by China, aggressive and physical yet below the threshold of kinetic war.<\/p>\n Nor does Wong claim to have found a solution: \u201cI envision the China relationship as one which will always necessarily require wise navigation of differences\u2026 the existence of a dialogue is not of itself going to remove difference, but it will enable us to manage difference better.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cChina will continue being China and continue to assert its interests.\u201d In other words, we should expect dangerously aggressive manoeuvres by China\u2019s military against Australia\u2019s to continue indefinitely.<\/p>\n The best response to Xi\u2019s 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 \u201cstrategic\u201d, by which she means military.<\/p>\n The overarching aim is to create and maintain a \u201cregional balance\u201d of power constraining Xi\u2019s move to exert hegemony, she says: \u201cA region when no one dominates. No country is dominated and all countries\u2019 sovereignty is respected.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n \u201cImportantly,\u201d Wong says, she wants to \u201ctalk about what happens next, what is the political process which leads \u2013 which has the capacity to lead \u2013 to lasting peace?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cThe overriding objective is we want to keep our country unified.\u201d<\/p>\n The world\u2019s problems, one way or another, are Australia\u2019s. And that makes them Penny Wong\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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