Putting a big share of bilateral ties in hands of diaspora: Aus high commissioner to HT
Education, rooftop solar, agriculture, broadening of defence and security cooperation, are among the five priorities for Philip Green.
Australia is ready to push for the finalisation of a comprehensive economic cooperation agreement with India after an interim trade deal has already helped grow Indian exports by 66% in the past five years, Australian high commissioner Philip Green has said.
In an exclusive interview with HT on completing a year in New Delhi, Green listed education, India’s push for rooftop solar energy, agriculture, broadening of defence and security cooperation, and giving the Indian diaspora in Australia a greater role in shaping bilateral ties as among his five priorities. Edited excerpts:
Q. How do you look at the India-Australia relationship after being here for a year? What are the areas you will focus on for the future?
A: We are at a very high point in the bilateral relationship and the level of acceleration over the last five years is historic. After a year here, my principal objective is to keep up that level of acceleration. There are three underlying drivers of this bilateral relationship, the first is strategic alignment. Australia and India have been friends for a very long time, but strategic alignment is different. We perceive the same problems in our region and we’re working in a shared way to seek solutions. Australia has always had an economic interest in India, but you know there’s something very special about the fifth biggest economy that’s growing at 7-8% per annum. For Australia, this is a neighbour, this is a strategic partner and, and most importantly, this is a country with huge complementarity with the Australian economy. The second strategic driver is the complementarity of our two economies. The third strategic driver is what we call the human bridge – nearly one million people of Indian-origin who are making a huge contribution to our society and we are investing in the Indian diaspora in Australia as a mechanism to drive further the bilateral relationship.
There are five things I would like to identify that are new in the bilateral relationship. First, there’s long been a strong partnership between Australia and India in education but this is the first year that Australian universities have begun teaching courses in India – foreign branch campuses of Deakin University and Wollongong University, the only two universities that have set up foreign branch campuses in Gujarat’s Gift City. Two other Australian universities have already said they will open branch campuses here and I know there are more to follow. Secondly, we’ve got a big partnership in the renewable sector, but we’re focusing on rooftop solar. [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi has said he wants 10 million rooftop solars within a short time. Australia is the country with the largest penetration of rooftop solar per capita, more than one-third of Australian homes have solar panels on roofs. We have some skills and capabilities and some firms with expertise in this and we’re determined to make that available to India as it seeks to go about its important goal.
Thirdly, a new focus on agriculture. Australia has a very respectable history in agriculture and so many people tell me 700 million people, half the population of India, derive their income from the land. More Australian agri-tech can be used to better the life of Indian farmers and as we shoot towards the second phase of the free trade agreement, I would very much like that to be a big bundle of this effort.
Fourthly, in the security sphere, we’re doing all sorts of things in terms of exercises. We have decided to have a 2+2 at the level of the foreign secretaries and the defence secretaries. We’re adding to the infrastructure at the secretaries’ level as a way of strengthening the overall strategic balancing coordination.
Fifthly, the inauguration of the Centre for Australia India Relations, which is an Australian government funded multimillion dollar effort to show our faith in the Indian diaspora in Australia and to call on them to be part of the effort to strengthen this bilateral relationship and, particularly, the economic side of the relationship. Indian people in Australia will have understanding of this economy and the way that business is done here, which is unrivalled, and we want to put that to the benefit of the bilateral relationship. We are putting a greater share of the bilateral relationship in the hands of the diaspora.
Q. One of the areas that’s been in focus in the recent years is cooperation on critical minerals. What is holding up things and when will we see the supply chains bringing critical minerals from Australia to India?
A: We’re pursuing this on two tracks. We’ve got a G2G track, which is where Australia’s Critical Minerals Office and Khanij Bidesh India Limited (KABIL) are working to look at the feasibility of five particular projects in critical minerals, mostly lithium and some cobalt, and that will deliver results in terms of identification of projects before the end of this year. The second thing we are doing is the G2B side, where I’m engaging with Indian businesses, be they in private hands or government enterprises, on their interest in critical minerals and many Indian firms are out there, some have got access to land, some are looking at partnerships with Australian firms. Others are looking at the way in which they might form part of the development of critical minerals, not just for lithium hard rock but moving it to up the supply chain to hydroxide. This is not going to happen overnight. Mining operations take years to develop. Critical minerals in Australia are in very high demand and India is not the only player. The Americans and the Japanese have been there for a while. The Europeans are around, and one of the things I’m urging my Indian friends is to move fast and not miss opportunities. But it’s my obligation, and I take this very seriously, to make sure Indian firms get access to all the government and non-government actors in Australia who can help them. Another big delegation will be going from India to Australia in October. So, one reality is it’s a competitive field. The second reality is that none of us have got all of the technology at industrial scale that we need to do the onward processing. I’m encouraging Indian companies not just to invest in Australia but to help us and to engage with our other partners, Japanese, Americans, Europeans, in putting together the best partnerships. The truth is India too has got more to do in its supply chains. At the moment, most battery minerals are entering India either as cells or fully made-up batteries. There are other steps in the supply chain and we in Australia are seeking to go up that supply chain and we need Indian firms to come and meet us halfway. None of these is simple, but the level of focus of both of our governments is intense and in our private sector. I’m confident we will get there, but I’m not going to put a timeline.
Q. On rooftop solar, are you looking at joint ventures to make the panels in India?
A: This is all about India supplying its own solar panels and affixing them to its own roofs. Australia has some technology associated with the making of solar panels but the real strength that we have that relates [Prime Minister] Modi’s ambition is the technology of how you connect those solar panels to the grid in a way that is reliable, that doesn’t undermine supply, that allows householders to be sure that they are getting full advantage and to ensure the grid is properly managed. There’s all sorts of Australian enterprises that have been through this and that’s the principal expertise I want to bring to bear in India.
Q. In trade, where do the two sides stand in the process of upgrading the India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA) to the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA). Is there a time frame for this?
A: Let’s compare India’s exports to the world and to Australia. Over the last five years, India’s exports to the world have grown 37%. India’s exports to Australia have grown 66%, nearly twice as much, and ECTA is a part of that. It is making it easier for Indian firms to export to Australia, to make profits and to build jobs back here. You can see that in specific sectors, where exports of apparel are up 20%, exports of iron and steel are up 25%, exports of agricultural goods are up 30% just in the last five months. ECTA is working and working well.
India has been busy doing free trade agreements and congratulations to India for having succeeded with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and they seem to be well on the way with the UK. I can understand that in recent months, they have dominated much of the Indian negotiating attention. We in Australia are very ready to deeply engage to find an end game for this, I’m not going to put a year or a month on it, but we are ready to push for the end. We’ve had seven or eight rounds and there will be another round in the next few weeks. I saw [commerce] secretary [Sunil] Barthwal recently, commerce minister Piyush Goyal and our trade minister spoke by Skype, so there’s a lot of activity and we are keen to move this thing forward in the very near future.
Q. In education, the number of Indian students in Australia was close to 120,000. Are you looking to grow that number because some new regulations have put curbs on the number of foreign students?
A: That number may grow. As far as I understand, there are 18 million Indians who emerge from school at age 18 each year and need some sort of training to become job-ready. Australia can’t train them all. There are limits in our country to the number of foreign students that we will be able to have. At the moment, we are dealing with a situation in Australia where we are hitting some of those limits, particularly in terms of housing availability and so on. We won’t see a continuation of the rapid acceleration of the number of Indian students in Australia. There may still be more, there may be a few less. I frankly think it will be about stable and what I’m confident of is that between the number of students that are being taught in Australia and the number who are going to be taught in India, and the latter is going to rise rapidly, we will continue to have a burgeoning education sector between Australia and India.
Q. In defence, how do you see the Australia-India partnership growing and what are the new areas cooperation that can help stabilise regional security?
A: On the first part, the answer may seem a little boring. Part of the answer - we’ve had a huge number of firsts in the last five years. We need to regularise and normalise the things that we have done for the first time, part of what was very important under my watch for this defence relationship. There will be new things but to keep doing the things we’re doing again and again until they are normalised. Important new things are happening. India is a partner in our high-level war fighting exercise Pitch Black this year for the first time, we are going to Tarang Shakti for the first time. We’ve had the first Malabar [naval exercise] in Australia. We’re looking forward to Malabar again in October. The pattern of exercises is like we’ve never seen before and a big part of what we’re doing is just to maintain that and make sure that it all goes as smoothly as it should.
The field where I would really like to make more progress is maritime domain awareness. The northeast Indian Ocean is a vital strategic waterway connecting the broader Indian ocean and its passages to the Gulf, to the South China Sea. Australia’s west coast faces the northeast Indian Ocean, India’s east coast faces the northeast Indian Ocean. We both have big interests there. We frankly neither individually have the capacity to monitor this airspace and maritime space. The more we can operate together to share the burden and share the data that we each have, the greater will be both of our understanding of this important waterway, whether we do that bilaterally or through the Quad. my strong ambition is that we are working much more deeply in this field.
Q. Would that feed into the Quad’s maritime domain awareness initiative?
A: That’s right. A lot of that has been focused on how we make publicly available but expensive data available to third countries. That’s a good thing and we should do more of it. But the field where I want to play more is bilateral and quadrilateral understanding of these domains for our own interests.
Q. On the Quad, how is cooperation progressing in key areas such as Open RAN, infrastructure and health, security?
A: We are already seeing a lot more infrastructure. The field that Australia is particularly focused on is submarine cables, which are vital for a country’s ability to access high-quality internet and have that access in a way that they can be confident that would be operationalised for the sovereignty and strategic benefit of that country. Particularly with the Americans and the Japanese, we’ve been working on making more submarine cables available in the Southwest Pacific. We would be delighted if India chose to come into some of that work together, although frankly I don’t think we should get hung up on whether four countries are involved in every initiative that we undertake. If you were looking for an area of activity where we will be ramping up and doing more as Quad, as the individual members of the quad in some combination, I think submarine cables is a crucial one.
But on the Quad in general, I want to underline just how strong the commitment is amongst the four to make a big difference in our region and I think we have sent a huge message that in a region that is contested and has some challenges in security terms, that these four countries, all democracies, all stand for the rule of law, that we are working together to shape a region which is sovereign and where none is dominant and no country is dominated. That’s the vision that we have, and I think it has been vitally important. We’d be in a much worse shape. It’s been vitally important that we have sent that big signal to our region.
Q. What does Australia make of China’s aggressive and assertive actions across the region, including on the border with India and in the South China Sea?
A: We have been stabilising our relationship with China and that’s an important and good thing. Nobody, no country in the world, should want an unstable relationship with a nation as important as the People’s Republic of China. We have now more engagement, including at a senior ministerial level, with China and to a large extent the rhetoric which characterised our previous engagement with China has been toned down and we can have a discussion which is measured. None of that has changed our strategic understandings of our region and our determination to work closely with our strategic partners. We have been very clear in public as well as in private about the areas which give us concern. China is undertaking the largest military modernisation seen on the planet since World War 2 and that is happening without any public reassurance as to what its purpose is. That’s a concern for us. China has been engaged in dangerous and destabilising activities around waters and features claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea. We’ve been very clear that we find that very unwelcome. In our own case, our aeroplanes have been subject to laser attacks, navy divers in international waters subject to sonar attacks. We’ve been very clear that it’s not acceptable. I’ll let the Indian side speak for itself and I sense that there are hastening discussions between India and China about ways in which the level of tension might be brought down. But I equally see India being ready to call out more frequently activities of China which are unwelcome. So, I sense that there is an increasing level of convergence between Australia and India and the way in which we deal with the People’s Republic of China.
Q. How does Australia view developments in Myanmar and Bangladesh, especially the recent turmoil in both countries? Could the Quad or Australia work on these issues?
A: On Myanmar first: We’re deeply concerned about developments there and we we have called for and continue call for an alleviation of the humanitarian situation. More fighting means more people who are at grave risk and that concern. We support Asean’s effort to address the crisis and we would like to see Myanmar being more ready to implement Asean’s five-point plan. At the end of the day, we want to see the return of democracy to Myanmar. We were all enormously buoyed by the developments of the decade before, where this country, which had had a long and troubled history, found a path to democracy. We still think that’s possible. We will be supporting whatever effort is available to bring Myanmar back to the back to the path of democracy and peace.
In relation to Bangladesh, we first of all express our sorrow at all of those who’ve been caught up with the violence there and condolences to them and their families. We welcome the appointment of Muhammad Yunus as interim leader and we wish his interim government well. We will be finding ways of supporting them. It’s a very different situation, but once again, you know we are looking for the re-establishment of peace and order and we note that India has taken a particular interest in the harmony between community groups in Bangladesh and we would share that. Bangladesh is an important partner for us and has been for many years as a stable and economically growing country, and we trust that it can return quickly to that level of order and at the same time, an early path to the restoration of democracy. This is India’s neighbourhood but it is a neighbourhood which is important to us as part of the Indo-Pacific region. There are big challenges here and we understand that India has very specific interests and engagements with these countries. I would like to see Australia and India being able to be more operating in tandem in this region. We won’t always agree on every aspect of every country, but I think as we strengthen our partnership through the Quad and bilaterally, we should be trying to change the Venn diagram so there are more areas of operation where Australia and India, in countries like this, are thinking and acting alike.
There are two other important things that will happen in the next six months. The first is the Australian government will publish an Australia-India economic roadmap to highlight the huge opportunity that is caused by our complementary economies, our neighbourhood and the fact that we are strategic partners. It will be about what we are already doing together and the huge future that we see together. The second is the Border-Gavaskar cricket series in Australia from November to January. The Australian government is going deep on this. We will be establishing a range of activities around each of the games, in partnership with Cricket Australia and Star Sports. We are seeking to use cricket to get beyond cricket in the Australia-India relationship and I personally have a big ambition to use this as an opportunity to get as many senior business and political figures out to Australia. I hope they come for the cricket and they might stay to do half a day’s business.