AFA Monthly logo

24 February 2021

With Greg Earl

Facebook diplomacy


Scott Morrison moved quickly last week to seek support from foreign leaders for Australia’s showdown with Facebook, which led to the tech giant banning news from its Australian platform.

Given the potential economic power a global technology platform can wield in a dispute – even with a relatively large economy, such as Australia – seeking diplomatic support was a good strategic move on Australia’s part.

Australia already has global credibility on this issue, due to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s innovative work on regulating the power of social media companies.

Combined, these actions may have played a role in Facebook’s decision on Tuesday to reverse its position on blocking news.

However, the Australian government should be aware that advancing its competition policy at the diplomatic level, as Morrison did in a conversation with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, poses risks – especially given the complex relationship between social media companies and democracy.

New technology was once lauded as a global democratising force, but it is increasingly seen as a means of concentrating economic and political power.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has skilfully used social media to campaign in India, Facebook’s biggest market and the world’s biggest democracy, but his government has also confronted Facebook and Twitter for providing digital platforms to his opponents, including those involved in the current farmer protests.

A democracy like Australia must be careful that its attempts to foster a more competitive social media ecosystem are not cynically exploited by authoritarian regimes – such as China or post-coup Myanmar – to justify placing constraints on the technology’s liberalising potential.


The Quad rises

Last week, foreign ministers from Australia, the United States, Japan and India held the first meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue since Joe Biden took office.

The telephone meeting was convened at the request of the new administration, suggesting that the Quad is likely to play an important role in Biden’s promise that the United States will consult more often with like-minded democracies.

This was the foreign ministers’ third meeting since the idea of the Quad was revived in 2017, in response to China’s growing assertiveness. The group was launched a decade earlier, but it faltered due to its members’ differences, including their differences on China.

Last week’s telephone meeting followed Japanese media reports that the United States wants to step up the pace of the group’s activities by holding a leaders’ meeting in future months. But a US statement after the meeting only referred to an annual meeting of ministers, along with regular officials’ meetings.

The Quad is one of a growing number of ‘mini-lateral’ diplomatic gatherings across the Indo-Pacific that Australia is playing an active role in – but it is one of the more significant of these groups.

Australia’s interest is in both engaging with China and hedging against Chinese assertiveness. To achieve these aims and to support the long-term prosperity of the Quad, Australia should work to ensure the Quad focuses on more than just constraining a rising China.


Vietnam power play

The Vietnamese Communist Party has just conducted its thirteenth national congress – a leadership renewal process that occurs every five years. In Vietnam, power has been shared and regularly rotated among four senior leaders since the end of the Second Indochina War.

This time around, the unusual decision was made to give the senior leader and general secretary of the party, Nguyen Phu Trong, a third term – despite the fact he has exceeded the retirement age of sixty-five. He will also remain president, a role he took over when the incumbent died in 2018 and which is usually kept separate from the general secretary role.

The prime minister, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, an economic reformer and friend of Australia, missed out on the top job in what was apparently a highly contested congress. He might still become president in the future.

While there appears to have been an opaque compromise between competing ideological and geographic factions in the Communist Party, the lack of expected change at the top level seems to hint at a fragile leadership.

This uncertainty is significant, because Vietnam is emerging as a rising player in Asia and seems set to play a more important regional role. It is more comfortable with trade liberalisation than many of its peers, it has managed COVID-19 particularly well, and its fast-growing economy has just overtaken those of Malaysia and Singapore.

It has also become one of Australia’s newer diplomatic interlocutors in the region – a status that is being reinforced by the development of the Australia–Vietnam Enhanced Economic Engagement Strategy, which aims to enhance trade and investment between the two countries.


-

Want more insightful discussion on our place in the world? Subscribe to the print journal to have Australia’s best voices on foreign affairs in your mailbox three times a year.

Explore subscription options.

-
-
-

Can China change the definition of human rights?

“By promoting a redefinition of human rights to include economic and physical security, China is essentially hoping to shift the goalposts so it can better compete with the liberal democracies for the moral high ground of human rights protection.” Shannon Tiezzi,The Diplomat

Biden’s brief window to fix the world’s broken institutions

“The consequences of these out-of-date institutions are the same: more fragmentation and less US influence. As the funding, legitimacy and effectiveness of these institutions dwindle, regional competitors emerge.” Adam Triggs, East Asia Forum

Allies but not friends? New Zealand and Australia

“We can all talk endlessly about common interests and values. But there are now some very obvious strains in the daily business of the relationship at the prime ministerial level.” Robert Ayson, The Interpreter (Lowy Institute)
-
-

US–China economic competition in the Indo-Pacific and beyond

“The Regional Economic Comprehensive Partnership is a significant win for China … Despite China’s economic and even military aggression with territorial disputes … RCEP proved to be a way for Beijing to gain economic control in the region.” Palomi Chaturvedi, The Geopolitics

Australia–Indonesia relations – keeping it real

“The government could do far worse with its aid funds than expand the Australia Awards program significantly … Many recipients have come away from the experience understanding Australia better and valuing it more, and some have risen to senior levels of [Indonesian] government and business.” David Engel, The Strategist (ASPI)
Free from Australian Foreign Affairs

Middle-power might – a plan for dealing with China

“Central to the story of the deterioration in Australia–China relations has been the rise of Xi Jinping. China’s supreme leader is also its most autocratic since Mao, and exceptionally sensitive to criticism – as the considerable number of his imprisoned critics in China can attest. Xi’s harshest critics within (or recently evicted from) the Party may be right when they say that 70 per cent of China’s 92 million Party members oppose his leadership. They may be wrong; it’s impossible to say.” Linda Jaivin, HERE


Read past editions of AFA Monthly


Sign up to AFA Monthly to get each new edition in your inbox