Security in, not from, Asia

If Australia’s engagement with Asia was Paul Keating’s “magnificent obsession”, Indonesia was its lodestar. In April 1992, Keating made Jakarta his first international visit as prime minister. He had told Hawke in their contest for the Labor leadership throughout 1991 that the country was more important than Africa or the Commonwealth, and in an interview with journalist Laurie Oakes in the middle of that year he was clear that strengthening ties with Indonesia would be his foreign policy priority. It was the country “with which we are yet to put the full constellation of foreign policy instruments in place”.