Australia’s new Labor Party government reinvigorates relations with South Africa and Africa

13 Dec 2022

South Africans and Aussies have a ferocious rivalry on the sports field. But when midfielder Keanu Baccus ran on to the pitch in Qatar after half time to help Australia’s Socceroos win a historic victory against Denmark at the World Cup this month, he illustrated a deeper side of South Africa’s relations with Australia.

Keanu Baccus was born in Durban and his family emigrated to Australia when he was a baby. “He really made the difference in that game,” says Australia’s assistant minister of foreign affairs, Tim Watts.

“The fact that we had four members of the Socceroos team — which far outperformed expectations — born in Africa, really captured the imaginations of Australians about the role of diaspora communities and particularly the half a million Australians who were born in Africa.”

“Australia is a migrant country. We are home to 300 different ethnicities; 50% of Australians were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas.”

The South African diaspora community is one of the largest and Watts sees it as key to growing relations between the two countries.

He was on Australia’s first ministerial visit to South Africa since 2014, suggesting a need for the injection of some tonic.

South Africa and Australia have had “close and constructive relations” regardless of which party was in power in Canberra.

But it’s clear relations became rather strained under the previous centre-right Liberal-National coalition government when, in March 2018, right-wing populist home affairs minister Peter Dutton called for Australia to take in white South African farmers as refugees because of the alleged abuse against them at home.

In May this year, the centre-left Labor party under Anthony Albanese defeated the Liberal-National coalition government of Scott Morrison in elections.

Relations reboot

And Watts suggested Labor was well placed to reboot relations with Pretoria, not least because of Labor’s “proud history of fighting apartheid in South Africa” and because of Labor’s roots in Australia’s trade union movement.

“One of the priorities of the new Albanese Labor Party government is re-engaging and reinvigorating our relationship with African countries, including South Africa,” he said.

The familiarity which Australians and South Africans feel for one another forms a solid foundation expanding all aspects of the relationship, including tourism, trade and investment, he believes.

“At the end of the day, it’s not governments that forge trade relationships… it’s not even corporations,” said Watts.

“It’s people who understand and trust each other. The people-to-people connections between Australia and South Africa are a rich resource to expand our trade and investment relationship.”

“South Africa is a very romantic destination for Australian tourists,” he notes, but adds that Covid knocked that out and also hit trade and investment.

Nonetheless, accumulated South African investment in Australia last year totalled some A$10.635-billion (about R127-billion) versus A$4.582 (about R54.7-billion) in Australian investment in South Africa.

Australia exported some A$1.826 billion (about R21.8-billion) in goods and services to South Africa and imported about A$1.314 billion (about R15.7-billion) — leaving South Africa with a trade deficit of just over half a billion Australian dollars (about R6.1-billion).

But Watts said Australia was determined to restore tourism, trade and investment to previous levels — and more.

The considerable surplus of South African investment in Australia versus vice versa casts some doubt on the popular perception that Australia is a graveyard for South African investment, including notable efforts by Woolworths and Pick n Pay.

Watts noted that Australia is “an open trading economy” and “businesses are going to succeed or fail in the market based on their own wits”.

“But I see many successful South African investment stories in Australia,” he adds. Both the insurance company Youi — owned by Outsurance — and the real estate company, Growth Point, are both “very significant” players in his country. Growth Point holds the lease for his own Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra.

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Apart from meeting his counterpart Candith Mashego-Dlamini and trade officials, Watts met Australian investors and traders in South Africa last week. The business leaders expressed optimism about commercial opportunities in South Africa.

“But clearly those opportunities could be enhanced by dealing with some of their concerns about the investment environment.

“The security situation, particularly around mining sites; the security of electricity supply, are things I know are getting the attention of the South African government. And the more progress that can be made, the more favourable the business environment will be and the more international investment that will be attracted.”

Watts notes that Australia is a major mining player across Africa and its mining companies have developed “very significant expertise”, particularly in extracting critical minerals.

These rare minerals like lithium, titanium and tantalum are essential ingredients of modern technologies such as mobile phones and computers, but also defence, aerospace and medical applications and green technologies such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and rechargeable batteries.

Watts sees a fruitful collaboration between Australia and South Africa in extracting these minerals, and adds that this would be in everyone’s interests as combating climate change will not be possible unless the world can significantly scale up the extraction of critical minerals.

Regional stability

Beyond the bilateral relationship, Watts said Australia views South Africa “as an important regional and global leader for causes of regional security and stability.”

He welcomed especially South Africa’s military intervention in northern Mozambique as part of the regional force fighting Isis-affiliated jihadi extremists; its leadership in trying to defuse the Eswatini political crisis; and its hosting of the successful Ethiopian peace talks last month.

Australia and South Africa are both members of the G20 club of major developed and emerging economies, and Pretoria’s upcoming presidency of the G20 in 2025 “is a recognition of the global leadership role which South Africa is increasingly taking on board”, Watts said.

This was part of the reason Australia had been strongly advocating for the need to reform multilateral institutions to reflect contributions like that of South Africa. In particular, Australia has been calling for a permanent African seat on the UN Security Council.

Like most other Western countries, Australia has been vigorously supporting Ukraine, politically and militarily, in defending itself against Russia’s invasion, which Watts calls “an appalling precedent… that a member of the UN Security Council can flagrantly breach the UN Charter through an unprovoked, immoral, unjustified invasion of a smaller neighbour.”

In sharp contrast, South Africa has remained “non-aligned” — or has even leaned a little towards Russia’s side and has failed to condemn its aggression at all.

But this is not harming SA’s relations with Australia, Watts said, as Australia accepts that “all countries will make their own determination on how they can best support an international rules-based order in accordance with their own national interests.”

Terrorism

Watts visited Morocco and Ghana before South Africa, on what was his first official African tour. He said Australia had a range of interests in Morocco, including green hydrogen projects, but especially in helping to counter terrorism.

He said Australia’s interest in countering terrorism was inspired by the terror bombing in Bali in 2002 which killed hundreds of civilians, including many Australians.

Canberra sponsors the UN counter-terrorism office in Rabat and provides training in crime scene investigation and interviewing of witnesses to six West African nations facing fast-rising terrorism threats. He notes that about half of all terrorist attacks in the world over the past year had been in West Africa.

Australia also provides about A$5-million (about R60-million) to the counter-terrorism academy in Côte d’Ivoire.

Likewise, Australia is discussing counter-terrorism with Ghana, which is now facing a growing terrorist threat from the north, through its increasingly unstable neighbour Burkina Faso.

Watts said Australia was particularly interested in funding for the Accra Initiative which Ghana and four other sub-Sahel countries — Burkina Faso, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo — had formed to try to prevent the growing terrorism in the Sahel spilling over on to them.

Watts praised Ghana for using its presidency of the UN Security Council in November to elevate climate change as an international security issue. He noted that Ghana had experienced this itself as climate change was causing economic displacement which was feeding the terrorism threat to its north.

Indo-Pacific tensions

Meanwhile, at home, Australia faces growing potential instability in its own backyard, the Indo-Pacific, which “is clearly being reshaped by geo-strategic competition at the moment”, Watts noted.

An increasingly confident China under Xi Jinping is making waves in the Pacific as it asserts ownership of islands in the South China Sea and turns up the volume of its claims to Taiwan. Other countries in the region and beyond are positioning themselves to respond, including by drafting Indo-Pacific strategies which seem implicitly designed to contain China.

Watts noted that the Labor government had recently moved to stabilise Australia’s “challenging” relationship with China and had ended the standoff under the previous government by meetings between the foreign ministers and then one between Xi and Albanese on the sidelines of the recent G20 summit.

But Watts emphasised that while the governments had changed, “our fundamental national interests haven’t changed.” So the Labor government remained fully committed to the Quadrilateral strategic security dialogue (The Quad) with the US, India and Japan and “Aukus” with the US and UK — created under the previous government.

Both have been seen as alliances to contain Chinese expansion, but Watts insists neither is a military alliance or grouping.

“Aukus is a capability acquisition agreement,” he says. The acquisition is nuclear-propelled — but not nuclear-armed — submarines for Australia.

And the Quad is “a group of countries seeking to work together to shape the region and ensure that it operates in the way that we want it to operate, where countries can make their own decisions, exercise agency, have their sovereignty respected.”

But in a region where China is creating artificial islands to expand its economic exclusion zones and trying to deny passage of others through them, do Quad’s goals not implicitly mean that it is a China-containment strategy?

Watts only repeats that Australia “wants a region where agency is respected, where national sovereignty is respected… a region governed by the rule of law and international law.”

That means the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, “which means nations being able to exercise their rights of free passage consistent with international law.” DM

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South Africa

Relations reboot

Regional stability

Terrorism

Indo-Pacific tensions