Richard Lawrence Leaver

Introduction: Australia, East Timor and Indonesia

This introduction provides an overview of events influencing Australias East Timor policy and eventual decision to support the deployment of UN peacekeepers in 1999. The piece outlines internal Australian policy discussions leading over the East Timor issue, and the Howard governments reversal of policy from backing policies of enhanced autonomy and the avoidance of the use of military force, to backing policies of East Timorese independence and the intervention of a multinational military force. The piece also sets the scene for the other articles dealing with East Timor by Desmond Ball, and Patrick Candio and Roland Bleiker.

The evolution of an Asia‐Pacific policy community in Australia

Abstract Australian Labor governments have, in recent times, become particularly active in shaping the form and content of regional forums where outstanding economic and security issues can be semi‐publicly aired. An increasing number of analysts have characterized this activist role with APEC and CSCAP as a manifestation of ‘intellectual leadership’, and have explained this evident concern with the promotion of common understandings (and hence the possibility of rules) as the natural stance of ‘middle powers’. This paper surveys the means by which Australias Labor governments came to engage in these regional dialogues; the arguments that have facilitated that engagement; and the individuals who have played leading roles in articulating those arguments. It concludes with brief observations about the possible trajectory of these two regional dialogues, and reference to some of the obstacles they might pose for future Australian governments.

Australia, Trade Policy and the Global South: An Odyssey over Five Decades?

Abstract Like many states in the Global South, the Australian economy relies heavily on the natural resource sector for a large proportion of its export earnings. Four decades ago, this basic similarity eventually induced Australian governments to become ‘fellow travellers’ with the G77 quest for a new international economic order. When that quest was put to rest by the rise of neo-liberalism, Australian governments then became fervent believers in free rather than managed trade; but in the contemporary era where neo-liberalism is now a dying policy creed, Australias current resource boom begs the question of whether the time is now ripe for Canberra to reinvent this role. What the rationales might be for that ‘back to the future’ policy move is explored in the context of Australias iron ore trade with China.

Factoring energy security into Australian foreign and trade policy: Has luck run out?

When energy prices rose dramatically in the 1970s, the impact on Australia was cushioned by two developments: the timely discovery of domestic oil in Bass Strait; and of the Japanese conversion to thermal coal. With falling oil imports and expanding coal exports, Australia emerged as a net energy exporter. But both these forms of good luck are now running out – and at a time when free market views about energy security hold the policy court. Since, however, market failure is characteristic of the new age of expensive energy, the scope for considered Australian choices has narrowed considerably.

An Australian international political economy? The high road and the low road

Drawing on Karl Polanyis distinction between formal and substantive theory, this article argues that ‘an Australian international political economy’ could (and should) be erected on the historical study of Australias substantive articulations with the global economy.

The failing NPT: the case for institutional reform

There is no question that the failure of the most recent Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the most serious in the long list of the treaty’s failed Review Conferences. But it is not the first time that a US� /Iranian stand-off has threatened Review progress. In 1995, Russia’s desire to sell reactors and lease nuclear fuels to Iran drew such strong US opposition through the mid-phases of the conference that it appeared for a time to undermine the possibility of the indefinite extension that otherwise totally preoccupied Washington. And a decade earlier, the new Islamic Republic was pretty much the last country to be brought into the consensus required for the release of a final text. But when compared to these earlier exercises in brinkmanship, what is most significant about the recent Review failure is its potential for further escalation. By the time of the next Review Conference, we are likely to have definite answers to the great unknowns that lay just beneath the surface of this year’s debacle. We will know whether or not the United States will resume nuclear testing in order to publicly demonstrate the capacities of its new generations of nuclear weapons. We will know whether or not Iran’s strategic competitors can resist the temptation to ‘do another Osiraq’. And we will know whether Tehran’s alleged civil nuclear program is really so peaceful. Wrong answers to any one of these questions would be, needless to say, extremely serious, probably sufficient to doom the next Review Conference. Wrong answers to more than one might well bring down the whole NPT framework. But there is an intervening period before these days of diplomatic reckoning arrive, and it begs the question of how that time might best be spent. To this end, the articles by Michael Wesley (2005) and Marianne Hanson (2005) anchor the ends of a spectrum of possible answers. Wesley favours the abandonment of the NPT*/ it should be emphasised, putting any faith at all in US counter-proliferation policies, which is how such arguments usually proceed. What concerns him are the NPT’s structural problems*/ the issues of unfairness and inefficiency, to which Wesley adds its mounting opportunity costs. Instead of sinking more good energy after bad, he would rather see us acknowledge the unpleasant fact of gradual nuclear proliferation and begin the process of redirecting scarce arms control resources towards a regime that would channel proliferation along more stable pathways. His argument is in the best spirit of the gloomy tradition of arms control where