July 19, 2004

Australia and Malaysia should be good friends. With Dr Mahathir gone, they may well soon be, writes Eric Ellis

MALAYSIANS and the world media have rued the passage of the truculent Dr Mahathir Mohamed after 22 years as Malaysian prime minister last November. But not so Australian diplomats or their political masters.

For Canberra's much-relieved mandarins, November 1 last year, when the will-he-or-won't-he-go Mahathir finally did leave office, couldn't have come around quickly enough. Mahathir's irresistible penchant for feisty soundbytes and racialist politics, often two of the same thing, frequently perplexed Australia.

But for the canny Mahathir, Canberra was simply a useful Western whipping boy in his own backyard.

By beating up on Australia and its mirror-image of Washington's foreign policies (and he did the same with Britain), Mahathir could be anti-American without offending Washington. But Australians, in their sensitive innocence, took it personally and Canberra helped him by handling him badly -- witness Paul Keating's 1993 recalcitrant drama.

Urged on by so-called experts to engage him and talk it all out, Australian politicians of all stripes would invite him to Canberra for a mutual toke of the regional peace pipe. A delighted Mahathir would simply blow the smoke back in Australia's face ... with interest.

For closer observers, there was a tried and true pattern about Malaysia's frequent slights at Australian behaviour which under shiny new Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi they hope not to have to monitor.

The first inkling that Mahathir was grumpy about something Australian usually came from Malaysia's serpentine Works Minister, Samy Vellu, who as leader of the Malaysian Indian Congress, the weakest of the big three members of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, rarely left an opportunity for sycophancy towards Mahathir slip away.

Then followed condemnations from the various Barisan youth wings, and some harsh commentaries in the government-controlled press, usually mentioning Pauline Hanson/East Timor intervention/beer/boorishness/lack of culture.

If a minister other than Vellu chimed in, our diplomats knew this was serious but it was a rare spat to escalate that far.

Having re-secured his domestic franchise, Mahathir would contrive a press conference, smile a rudely elliptical answer to an Australian reporter's question, a buy-Australia-last campaign would be proposed and the diplomatic fissure would widen a bit more before Mahathir called it to a close, cannily always appearing the slighted bigger man.

Australia eventually learnt how to play him, the same way as the other neighbours largely did, by ignoring him. Towards the end of his reign, Mahathir simply became ridiculous, as for instance, his rant about Jews being the font of world evil.

By the time he left office, Mahathir had been largely relegated to background noise. Last month, he finally made that trip to Australia, addressing a conference on globalisation in Perth. He was a puppy.

Badawi is a different animal. The avuncular successor is secure in office after winning the March elections, with a stronger-than-Mahathir mandate that should preclude his former boss's need to periodically shore support with a vote-winning bout of xenophobia.

Diplomats on both sides have devoted this year to carefully patching back what should naturally be a pivotal regional relationship between two former British possessions -- and Australia being London's virtual colonial proxy on the Malay peninsula for much of the mid-20th century.

Badawi seems likely to visit Australia within the next year, although probably not before an Australian election and not before having a good look at the new government.

So far, Badawi is Mahathir Lite. There's very little, including his cabinet and senior advisers, that's not familiar from the days of Mahathir.

Mahathirnomics -- to fuel the economy with massive public spending -- has been wound back ever-so-slightly, and there's been a crackdown on cronyism as the so-called mega-projects are now going out to general tender instead of to trusted party insiders, many of whom were found wanting in the Mahathir years when it came to adequate book-keeping.

Elected as a cleanskin, Badawi is winding back the excesses of Mahathirism, even if it means lopping a point or two off Malaysia's 6 to 8 per cent GDP growth average of the past 20 years, the mid-90s financial crisis notwithstanding.

A member of Washington's coalition of the willing and, in Bali, a victim of Islamist terror, Australia needs Malaysia and its moderate advocacy of Islam. Although Indonesians, many of the Bali bombers were exiled in Malaysian Islamist schools and radicalised by the experience. Investigators have also learned that the September 11 attacks were in-part planned in Kuala Lumpur. The West needs Malaysia if not to help fight its wars then certainly to placate, employ and stabilise its extremists.

In this new world, Australia hopes to form a Badawi visit around a planned free trade agreement between Australia and Malaysia. That in itself would be a remarkable achievement. Mahathir would never have signed off on any deal involving Australia.

He made it a personal mission to isolate Australia from any regional associations, be it the wider ASEAN-based dialogue, the Asia-Europe discussions and his much-loved East Asia Economic Caucus. And with ASEAN operating on its famously dysfunctional consensus-style decision-making, Mahathir always got his way.

Australia and Malaysia support the World Trade Organisation and the Doha Round negotiations. Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile will this month host his Malaysian counterpart Rafidah Aziz, a woman who has offered many a tart aside about Australia in the past, when a formal announcement about free trade talks between Canberra and Kuala Lumpur is expected, following on from similar deals with Singapore and Thailand.

English-speaking Malaysia should be Australia's new best friend in the region. And with luck, more careful diplomacy, and no more Mahathir, it may well soon be.