Australia Strengthens Ties with Immediate Neighbors

China’s sudden diplomatic foray into South Pacific shakes up Canberra

Jun 7

By: B A Hamzah

Still in a celebratory mood after winning Australia’s May 21 general election, Premier Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong jetted to Tokyo to attend the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Summit, giving a rare opportunity for Albanese to meet with President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Fumia Kishida and President Narendra Modi, the other leaders of the Quad.

Besides discussing the threat from China in the Indo-Pacific, all gave thumbs up to Washington’s ideas to establish a framework for economic cooperation. Bereft of details, the IPEF is believed by critics to lack teeth and is an attempt to undermine the earlier initiative by Japan to reboot the Transpacific Partnership Economic Cooperation that President Donald Trump dumped. Biden doesn’t have the political popularity to rejoin the reconfigured pact, even if he wanted to. He enjoys close traditional relations with labor unions in the US, who find the agreement to be anathema. The IPEF is regarded in Washington as Biden’s best hope for a renewed free trade agreement, weak as it is.

One major drawback of the IPEF, just like Obama’s TPP, is the exclusion of China, the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity calculation. Premier Albanese must have found the exclusivity of the pact troubling as the Labor Party he heads want to repair the damaged economic relations with China brought about by his immediate predecessors. He might have found it awkward to discuss the threat from China and at the same time assist in charting a new economic strategy…