Director of International Projects Michael Morgan's address to the Australian Institute for International Affairs (AIIA) and Centre for Democratic Institution's (CDI) Public Forum on Australia's Role in Democracy Promotion,14 March 2008.

Date:  02 April 2008

Getting the politics of regional engagement right will be central to the extent to which we can promote a stable, diverse, well-governed region.

The future of democracy in the region will be determined by the choices made by the leaders of regional political parties and the citizens who vote for them. These decisions will determine the degree to which the commitments made now to progress towards stronger democracy will translate into sustainable outcomes for the people of Asia and the Pacific.

Democracy promotion should not be a simple process of selecting parties to support, but rather a comprehensive process of engagement and dialogue. There are inherent dangers domestically and for the potential recipient in blindly supporting the parties we assume to be our ideological counterparts or in trying to recruit political parties to our international associations. There are few prominent political parties in Asia and the Pacific with ideologies that overlap clearly with Labor or Liberal. The point is we are trying to strengthen political systems, not to back winners. Any progressive agenda for building democracy in our region needs to be realistic about what we are doing.

Great care should always be taken to ensure that programs are delivered in locally appropriate and productive ways. We cannot simply blunder in and claim an important mandate for reform without ever coming to grips with local contexts. Agencies like ours must work on trust and partnership with host governments and partner parties. The body-language of engagement is crucial to our enterprise.

An eye for local circumstances will also help us move on from focusing on the symptoms of bad political governance to helping develop appropriate responses to them. Our first set of major initiatives was the deployment of evaluation teams to all our major target countries: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, Philippines and Solomon Islands. The process is ongoing and developing continually. We have just launched a collaborative project with Vanuatu’s political parties in preparation for their elections in September 2008.

Providing frameworks for dialogue with political parties in Asia and the Pacific on campaigns is central to our strategy to consolidate democracy – from a democratic practitioner’s perspective this is what parties are about: campaigning for office. Campaigning is democracy in action. The campaign necessarily draws everyday people into the process of constituting government. It is the campaign which energises party structures and forces us to distil our policies into comprehensible messages for public consumption.

As advocates of democratic government, we should never make the mistake of thinking that we can simply export Australian models to our region to solve their governance challenges. But by actually engaging with our regional counterparts, we can help grow democracy in our region rather than allowing it to wither on the vine. Australia needs to engage our counterparts and encourage dialogue on key issues, to chart new directions in partnership. The need for effective action on our part requires understanding of the political contexts in which we are operating, to ensure we work with the right people, in the right ways, to help make progress. Our activities must support active domestic constituents to be effective and we must be realistic and humble about what we can achieve.

This is an annotated version of the address, to read the full version please download the attatched PDF file.