After the recent death of veteran Australian diplomat Richard Woolcott, Peter Job says the historical record leaves him an unquiet grave.
By Peter Job
Declassified Australia
An outpouring of tributes has followed the death, at the age of 95, of former Australian diplomat Richard Woolcott.
It’s hard to believe these days, but Australia used to be shy about proclaiming a defence or security guarantee to Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a gap opened between secret defence guidance about Australia’s determination to fight for the island arc and what Canberra said to the new nations of the arc.
Well into the 1990s, Australia promised to do its bit so South Pacific states could ‘look after their own strategic interests’; in a crisis, the focus of the Oz military would be ‘evacuation of Australian citizens’.
The mindset was crammed into one phrase by Ashton Calvert (secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1998 to 2005), who remarked to me that Australia’s policy in the South Pacific was ‘to intelligently manage trouble’. Australia would stand ready but stand back, keeping its hands off.