Perspectives on Australian foreign policy

The East Timor crisis of 1999 was always going to be a hard act to follow for the formulators of Australian foreign policy. On the one hand, Australia’s response to the crisis provided John Howard’s Coalition Government with a unique opportunity to claim a foreign policy triumph. They were able to cast themselves as defenders of the human rights of an oppressed people whose needs had been ignored by Australia and the world for 25 years. At the same time, it delivered them with a domestic political triumph, by outsmarting the Labor opposition in what former Labor leaders had appropriated as their own territory—Asia–Paci c diplomacy. It was never as simple as this of course, and critics were quick to point out other interpretations. Far from giving Australia a new credibility in the region, as the Prime Minister liked to claim, others argued that Australia’s Timor response smacked of an arrogant triumphalism which had alienated Australia from its neighbours and damaged its reputation in Asia (Fitzgerald 1999). By refusing to reveal its intelligence information on Indonesian militia plans moreover, and by choosing not to urge a greater role for the United States and an increased Unite