AUSTRALIA: Diplomacy to help create a better image
Updated
Australia is using public diplomacy to do everything from sell resources to China to fighting images of racism.The range of public diplomacy has been put to an Australian Parliamentary hearing on how Australia portrays itself across the world. The annual budget, last week, announced an extra 20-million dollars in spending for cultural diplomacy, to create a better understanding of Australia in the region.
Graeme Dobell
Presenter:
Speakers: Dr Lachlan Strahan of Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Professor Brian Hocking, Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy; Liberal Senator Marise Payne; Lachlan Strahan of Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
DOBELL: Traditional diplomacy was about governments influencing the elites that run other governments. The evolving idea of public diplomacy is about new ways of putting Professor Brian Hocking, currently at Canberra's Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy.
HOCKING: The focus, of course, as elsewhere, is to be smart. Soft power and hard power
is converted into what people talk of as smart power. That's the trick of managing the two in specific contexts, but it isn't cheap to do.
DOBELL: If globalisation is trumping the powers of national governments, does that influence the ways that messages can be pushed across borders? Professor Hocking sees a challenge to old ideas of sovereignty.
HOCKING: There is a new rule book of diplomacy. And one of the big issues is how you deliver it on the ground. Because it requires one to recognise that some of the assumptions about non-intervention in the domestic arena of the receptor state have to be questioned.
DOBELL: Government Senator Marise Payne told the Parliamentary hearing that she sees a divide between the views of Australia held by some political leaders in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, and the views expressed by the general community of those neighbouring states.
PAYNE: The consumption by the public, by the community, of issues in relation to Australia and their attitudes is overwhelmingly positive. Where the issues are - potentially at government-to-government level in the formal diplomatic channels, for a range of reasons, domestic politics on both sides
DOBELL: The Australian Government has committed an extra 20 million dollars over four years to spend on cultural diplomacy, to lift understanding of Australia in its region. Diplomat Dr Lachlan Strahan, head of the Images of Australia Branch of the Foreign Affairs Department.
STRAHAN: It's not to have isolated or "feel good" cultural that are not part of a thought-out strategy for moving forward these broader public diplomacy goals.
DOBELL: Adding up all the various programs, Dr Strahan says Australia spends about 455-million on public diplomacy annually. That ranges from convincing China that Australia is a reliable supplier for billion dollar worth of energy projects, to confronting old ideas of Australia as racist.
STRAHAN: It's an important issue for Australia to make sure that it is understood that our society is diverse, tolerant - and, yes, we do have some people in Australia who are racist.
But that applies, of course, all over the world.
DOBELL: Dr Strahan gave one example of Australia confronting a belief in Iran that Muslims who come to Australia have to give up their worship of Islam. The answer to dealing with such mistaken belief, he told the Parliamentary hearing, is to provide persuasive, factual information.
STRAHAN: The public diplomacy report we gave you from Teheran gave an example of some attitudes in Iran, some beliefs in Iran, about what we do here: if you visit here you have to give up your faith or you have to spit on the Koran. These are palpably, absolutely not true. So our job through a book like this is to make it very plain that Muslim Australians have complete freedom of worship. It's about providing the right kind of information through the right channels in a persuasive way.
