Policy gives Australia little room to move on Burma
The promise of smart sanctions and the restatement of existing policy shows the frustration and the tensions that have long afflicted Australia's policy towards Burma, as Graeme Dobell explains.

Australia's diplomatic dealings with Burma are conducted through gritted teeth, with a tone that mixes frustration with anger.

Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, at the United Nations this week, maintains that year in, year out, nothing happens on the reform front in Burma.

"Progress there is like watching glue flow up a hill," Mr Downer said.

The glue metaphor works in several ways, because Australia's policy on Burma has been stuck in roughly the same place for nearly two decades.

Burma is one of the unstated bipartisan elements of Australian foreign policy, reflecting a certain embarrassment for both the Coalition government and the Labor party, although you mightn't get that impression from the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd.

"Mr Howard's policy of constructive engagement with the Burmese regime on human rights for the last several years has not worked, it has not yielded an outcome," Mr Rudd said.

"Constructive engagement" is the policy that Southeast Asia announced as it allowed Burma to join ASEAN a decade ago.

The policy Australia adopted under Labor, when it was in office until 1996, and taken over by the Coalition, was the use of human rights "benchmarks", a carrot and stick approach to reward signs of progress.

The trouble is that the regime eats whatever carrots are offered and ignores the stick - we haven't heard much of benchmarks in recent years - in the same way that ASEAN's policy hasn't achieved anything constructive and certainly hasn't engaged the Burmese military.

When Alexander Downer took over as foreign minister, he also took over the Burmese "benchmarks".

His one change was to stop using the regime's preferred name, Myanmar - reverting to Burma in most of his public comments. At least irritating Rangoon would rate as some form of achievement.

The shape of that policy framework showed clearly on Thursday when the prime minister, John Howard, issued a statement expressing Australia's dismay at the crackdown.

The one new step, with no detail, was a promise that Canberra will impose targeted financial sanctions against leaders of Burma's regime.

The other points Mr Howard referred to are old stand-bys: support for a strong United Nations role, visa restrictions on Burmese leaders and the ban on defence exports.

The defence ban - Mr Howard called it longstanding - actually dates back to 1988.

The acknowledgement of Australia's relative inability to touch the regime was in the other point from the prime minister. Australia's diplomatic missions in Beijing, New Delhi and Southeast Asia will ask those governments to use their influence on Burma "to counsel restraint and push for genuine reforms."

The unspoken consensus of Australian politics means that beyond targeted or smart sanctions, Australia maintains full diplomatic relations with Burma, including aid programs such as that fighting HIV-AIDS and the human rights training program - at least they'll know what they're abusing. Thus, to fight drug trafficking, it makes sense for the Australian Federal Police to have an agent based in Rangoon. The irony is that agent is liaising with a "narco-state", a regime that makes a lot of money out of narcotics.

Australia's approach has always sat somewhere between the soft engagement policy of ASEAN and the tougher talk of the US and Europe. Given the stubborn bloody mindedness of Burma's regime, that is an Australian position which is both uncomfortable and unsatisfying. It is, at least, familiar, because that's where both sides of Australian politics have been forced to stand for nearly 20 years.

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