By Nick Fredman
In a manner reminiscent of the bloody anti-crime campaigns of the 1980s, Indonesian authorities have in recent weeks been clearing Jakarta's streets of beggars and other "unsightly" elements in preparation for the November 15 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum there. To prevent embarrassing political demonstrations, 15,000 troops have also been deployed.
The Australian government sees the APEC forum as an opportunity to push the goal it shares with the United States and Indonesian governments of an Asia Pacific free trade zone by 2010 or 2020. This is part of what Paul Keating and foreign minister Gareth Evans call a "constructive engagement with Asia".
The rhetoric is that Australia is moving away from its traditional ties and joining with a dynamic, modernising region for an era of free trade, economic growth and improving living standards and human rights.
The reality is that Australian big business, supported by its government, is positioning itself to further dominate and exploit the underdeveloped economies of South-East Asia and the Pacific, and is keen to keep in place the appalling wages and working conditions and authoritarian governments that make the region such an attractive area for investment.
As an imperialist country — one in which a few massive corporations dominate the local, advanced, economy and seek to exploit other, underdeveloped, countries — Australia has always "engaged" with the region for the sake of profits. Australian companies began to dominate Britain's colonies in the South Pacific economically from the early part of this century. Australia gained its own colony in Papua New Guinea after the previous colonial master, Germany, was defeated in World War I.
Australian troops fought in Malaysia and Korea in the 1940s and 1950s. The Australian government was a keen advocate of US intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s, and sent large contingents of its own troops there.
In these conflicts Australia intervened to promote "stability" — that is, the crushing of any threat to capitalist rule. When the worrying increase in the influence of the Communist Party and the left in Indonesia in the 1960s was wiped out by Suharto's 1965 coup, the Australian ruling class was relieved. "With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think we can say a reorientation has taken place", Harold Holt smugly declared.
Meeting with Suharto in 1974, Whitlam described an independent East Timor as "unviable" and "a threat", giving the green light to the Indonesian invasion. More recently Australia has aided PNG's brutal war and blockade against the Bougainville independence struggle.
An expansion of Australian business interests in the region began in the 1960s with mining operations by corporations such as BHP, CRA and Western Mining in South-East Asia, PNG, Bougainville and other Pacific islands.
Indonesia, with its market of 185 million people and a wealth of raw material and (cheap) human resources, is the centre of the turn to Asia. Here there are Australian investments of $2.5 billion and 130 Australian companies operating in mining, manufacture, infrastructure development and finance.
In a period of tough international economic competition, Australian business is seeking profits in the easier conditions of the Asia Pacific region. Raw materials can be extracted cheaply, yielding profits like CRA's $140 million per year from its Panguna copper mine in Bougainville. The environment can be exploited without much fuss, leaving disasters such as the biologically almost dead Ok Tedi/Fly river system in PNG, the result of BHP's mining operations.
"Low labour costs" — exploitative wages and conditions — are probably the biggest attraction. In Indonesia especially, where independent trade unions are banned and worker activists are regularly arrested, tortured and murdered, industrial relations are advantageous to business.
The desire to maintain these conditions is the basis for Australian support for authoritarian regimes. Australia also has to compete in the region with economically more powerful imperialist countries, particularly the US and Japan, and political support is a way of making up for lack of economic muscle.
Hence Australia's recognition of Indonesia's occupation of East Timor (also more directly motivated by Timor Gap oil profits), Keating's description of Indonesia as the most important country to Australia, Evans' recent statement that the human rights situation in Indonesia is moving in a "wholly positive direction" and the close cooperation in APEC. The ACTU, closely allied with the ALP government, aids the Indonesian government's suppression of workers by supporting the military-run puppet union, SPSI.
As part of maintaining "stability", the Australian military is expanding its role in the region, with Australian troops on Bougainville as part of a "peacekeeping force", closer military cooperation with Indonesia planned and a new defence white paper projecting a more forward "defence" and the development of new weapons systems.
Neighbouring peoples are always going to have economic, political and social relations. But our foreign relations should not be based on supporting economic exploitation that does nothing for working people in Australia, let alone for those in the rest of the region.
We must support struggles for democracy and social justice in the region, especially where Australian businesses and governments are involved. Such solidarity is connected to the struggle for real democratic control of economic and political affairs in Australia, because the big corporations that exploit other nations of the region exploit and dominate working people here too.