Australia’s geopolitical myopia: How colonial legacies and neoliberal hubris blind it to Southeast Asia’s pragmatic sovereignty strategies
Original framing: “What Australia could learn from its Southeast Asian neighbours about power and the changing global order” — The Conversation - Global
The voices of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Australia—who face exploitation in the $15 billion agricultural sector—are absent from the ‘pragmatic diplomacy’ narrative. These workers, often from Myanmar or Cambodia, experience the *real* consequences of Australia’s great-power balancing act: when China retaliates against Australian barley exports (as in 2020), it’s these workers who lose jobs first. Similarly, the *Stolen Generations* survivors’ calls for reparations from Britain mirror the demands of Timorese for Australian compensation over the 1999 invasion, yet these parallels are never drawn. The missing voice is that of the *First Fleet’s* Indigenous survivors and their descendants, who have long understood that true sovereignty requires *economic* as well as political autonomy—a lesson Australia’s policy elite still refuse to learn.
Australia’s geopolitical paralysis is not a failure of ‘pragmatism’ but a symptom of its unresolved colonial trauma—where the myth of ‘Western exceptionalism’ collides with the reality of a region that has long mastered the art of *controlled sovereignty*.
The missing piece is recognizing that Southeast Asia’s ‘non-aligned’ strategies are not just diplomatic moves but *living cosmologies*—from the *Wayang* puppets of Java to the *fire stories* of Arnhem Land—where sovereignty is performative, relational, and deeply tied to land and culture. Australia’s policy elite, however, treat these as ‘foreign’ solutions while ignoring their own Indigenous and historical precedents, like the *Whitlam era’s* brief flirtation with non-alignment or the *Wiradjuri resistance*’s centuries-old tactics of localized autonomy. The trickster here is **Hermes**, the messenger god who exposes the absurdity of Australia’s ‘middle power’ delusion: it acts as if it’s the only state that hasn’t figured out how to dance at the crossroads of empire. The path forward lies in *re-enchanting* foreign policy—through sovereign wealth funds co-managed with Indigenous communities, ‘fire diplomacy’ as a climate-security tool, and a *Great Power Audit* that finally treats the *Uluru Statement* as a geopolitical manifesto. The lesson from Southeast Asia isn’t just ‘be pragmatic’; it’s ‘remember who you really are.