{"id":19220,"date":"2015-03-24T11:52:16","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T00:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=19220"},"modified":"2015-03-27T11:18:12","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T00:18:12","slug":"lee-kuan-yew-and-oz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/lee-kuan-yew-and-oz\/","title":{"rendered":"Lee Kuan Yew and Oz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mr<\/a>A useful history of Australia\u2019s actions, apprehensions and aspirations in Southeast Asia over the last 75 years could be written using Lee Kuan Yew as actor and commentator.<\/p>\n

As a young translator, working for the Japanese during WWII, Lee remembered seeing the Australian POWs being marched through the streets. He wrote in his memoirs<\/a>: \u2018The capture of thousands of their soldiers by the Japanese Imperial Army will forever be seared into Australia\u2019s national memory, a disaster second only to Gallipoli. But Singapore is nearer home and strategically more relevant to Australia.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the decades that followed, Australia might not have figured large for LKY, but it did figure. And all the things that shaped or drove the Singapore leader resonated for Australia: Japanese conquest, the end of Britain\u2019s Asian role, the US as regional security guarantor, the challenge of Communism, the difficult birth and early struggles of Asian independence, the evolution of regionalism, the Asian economic miracle, the rise of China and the coming of the Asian Century.<\/p>\n

During Confrontation with Indonesia, for instance, Lee judged Australia\u2019s diplomacy as steady and deft. Australia didn\u2019t abandon Malaysia and Singapore, he wrote, but \u2018was careful not to upset the Indonesians or make them feel that they were being ganged up against.\u2019<\/p>\n

Come forward three decades, and Lee wrote that Canberra\u2019s response to the East Timor crisis in 1999 reflected Australia\u2019s sense of guilt over Timor, but became a \u2018defining moment\u2019 for Australia\u2019s role in the region: \u2018Whether or not it was wise to have proposed self-determination for East Timor, Australia did right in leading INTERFET into East Timor to put a stop to the inhumanity being perpetrated. While no Asian leader voiced support for Australia as it led INTERFET troops into East Timor, all knew that Australia was saving an ugly situation from getting worse. It was an operation costly in political and economic terms for Australia, a task no country in the region would have undertaken. If Australia had not acted after the part it had played leading to the vote for independence, it would have earned its neighbours contempt.\u2019<\/p>\n

Contempt for Oz wasn\u2019t an unfamiliar feeling for LKY. He found Gough Whitlam \u2018quick-witted but also quick-tempered\u2019, and was glad to see the end of the \u2018acerbic\u2019 Labor leader: \u2018It was a relief when their Governor-General removed Whitlam…\u2019<\/p>\n

Whitlam\u2019s return shot: \u2018In frequent meetings with Lee I became used to his forceful arguments against change before it occurred and his serene rationalisation of change after it had occurred.\u2019<\/p>\n

The big clash between Lee and Whitlam was over Australia\u2019s initial reluctance to take too many of the Vietnamese boat people. In 1975, LKY taunted that the boats should keep sailing to \u2018salubrious\u2019 Australia, where refugees should ask for Whitlam, \u2018a very sympathetic Prime Minister who believes the White Australia policy is most deplorable and damnable and here is his chance.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the effort to create APEC in 1989, Singapore was Australia\u2019s strongest backer within ASEAN. At the second APEC ministerial, held in Singapore in 1990, Lee commented: \u2018APEC was only a concept. Australia\u2019s good timing and skilful diplomacy brought it into fruition.\u2019 Conversely, when Kevin Rudd floated his proposal for a new Asia Pacific Community<\/a> (PDF) in 2008, Singapore headed the successful ASEAN campaign to kill the idea. In the words of one senior Indonesian analyst<\/a>, Rudd\u2019s Community was, \u2018kicked to death by Singapore.\u2019<\/p>\n

Australia was at its most important as an influence on LKY\u2019s destiny in the unsuccessful attempt to marry Singapore to Malaysia. In the efforts to negotiate with Malaysia\u2019s leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Lee paid tribute to Australia\u2019s High Commissioner, Tom Critchley. The Australian diplomat, he wrote, knew how to ease the Malaysian leader slowly towards big decisions. And that included not beating him at golf or poker: \u2018Critchley might lose a few hundred dollars to him at poker over the months \u2013 not big money, but not tiddlywinks either. The Tunku liked winning, or rather did not like losing. It was part of his royal upbringing.\u2019 When LKY trounced the Tunku in one golf match, the British High Commissioner \u2018took me to task for being tactless.\u2019<\/p>\n

Lee said it was the British \u2018with the help of the Australians\u2019 who persuaded the Tunku to admit Singapore to the federation in 1963. In 1965, as the pressure mounted over Singapore\u2019s place inside the federation and Confrontation with Indonesia boiled, Lee visited Australia for an 18-day tour that took him all over the country. Lee felt that Australia\u2019s Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, carried more weight with the Tunku than the British Prime Minister: \u2018Unlike Harold Wilson, Menzies was a conservative and had always supported the Tunku. The Tunku had spoken of him in warm terms and if Menzies would now urge him to seek a solution for Malaysia through political accommodation and not force, he was more likely to succeed than if Wilson did so.\u2019<\/p>\n

When Lee wrote to Menzies that disaster loomed between Malaysia and Singapore, he saw the Australian PM\u2019s reply as supportive but carefully balanced. Menzies wrote that a sensible settlement was still possible and urged LKY to have \u2018patience as the constant companion of your unquestioned abilities.\u2019<\/p>\n

The military dimension of Australia\u2019s relationship with Singapore has always been more intimate than any other nation in Southeast Asia. The old yet still beating expression of this is the Five Power Defence Arrangements, created in 1971 to guarantee Malaysia and Singapore; the newer version, in bilateral guise, is the fact that the numbers of Singaporean military who train in Australia each year (4,000) are bigger than those who come here from the US<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An LKY history of Oz has at its centre his most famous line about us: the warning that Australians risked becoming \u2018the poor white trash of Asia.\u2019 The comment came out of that 18-day tour in 1965. As a typical Lee shaft, it was designed to hit and hurt, to be heard and heeded.<\/p>\n

When first uttered, Singapore was muttering about the White Australia policy (thus White Australia to white trash) and starting to rage against Australia\u2019s high tariff protection. Trust LKY to boil a complex argument down to the sharpest of points: if Australia wanted to stay rich and prosperous, it would have to open itself to the big new economic game unfolding in Asia, and open its immigration doors as well.<\/p>\n

\u2018Poor white trash\u2019 is the sort of line no journalist can resist. In interviewing LKY over the years, I asked him about it several times and always got a good headline about how far he was prepared to recant. His basic response was the warning was right in the 1960s, but Australia had heard and heeded and changed. Here is Lee on the trash issue<\/a> when I put the question to him in March 2007:<\/p>\n

\u2018No you have changed, I mean the Australia I came to in 1965 was a very different Australia, you were a white Australia, there was the Asian exclusion act, and in 1960s the US changed their rules and in 1967 or 68 you changed yours, and Canadians followed suit and we lost a lot of talent. And today we\u2019ve not only lost Malaysians and others who used to come to Singapore, in your last census there were 50-thousand Singapore born persons now in Australia, and more will come over time because they find when they can\u2019t make the top jobs and it\u2019s easier living here.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The unstated assumption in the trash line needs to be highlighted. Here was LKY, even in 1965, talking about Australia as part of Asia. And that was Lee\u2019s default position on Oz: we should and could be \u2018the odd man in, in Asia\u2019 (Richard Woolcott\u2019s phrase). That view of Australia\u2019s role in Asia put LKY on the other side of the fence from the other Asian values champion, Malaysia\u2019s Dr Mahathir, who was equally sharp in stating that Australia did not have a natural or even proper place in Asia.<\/p>\n

Lee Kuan Yew was consistent over the decades in the view he expressed in his memoirs: \u2018Australia\u2019s destiny is linked more to Asia, than to Britain or Europe.\u2019<\/p>\n

When a new MP, Pauline Hanson, was raging against Asianisation of Oz, Lee dismissed it as an \u2018egregious aberration\u2019 and said Australia had to go through with its long journey, moving from being Eurocentric to Asiancentric.<\/p>\n

No white trash, us. We listened to LKY.<\/p>\n

Graeme Dobell<\/a> is the ASPI journalist fellow. Image courtesy of National Archives of Australia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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