Reponse to Michael Wesley, Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s future

Correspondence to the Quarterly Essay

May 2026

At the core of Michael Wesley's Quarterly Essay 101, Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future, is the stark proposition that Australian influence in the region is "at an all-time low" as a result of an approach that “isolates and alienates us from our neighbours.” It is a remarkable, and ironic, blind spot of this essay that this argument is made with almost no reference to the foreign policy of the current Australian government. While Blind Spot provides a lengthy historical account of the missteps of past Australian governments in the region, it fails to engage with the objectives, the initiatives, or the regional response to the Albanese government's statecraft in Southeast Asia. Ironically, when Wesley does turn his focus to the Albanese government, he sees it only through the lens of great power competition that he seeks to critique. In the process, Blind Spot misses the most active and successful period of Australian diplomacy in Southeast Asia in our nation’s history.

Throughout Blind Spot, Wesley implicitly treats the Albanese government's foreign policy as a continuation of the approach of Australian governments over the last three decades. Australia, he argues, neglects Southeast Asia because we fear China too much and follow the US too often. In his telling, in Southeast Asia, "the objectives and rationales of our diplomacy remain unclear" and amount to little more than "bromides about the importance of the region." In service of this argument, he cites specific examples of missteps of the Howard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments. But at no point does he engage with the explicit foreign policy objectives of the Albanese government, nor evaluate their effectiveness after four years in office. Had Blind Spot done so, it would have found precisely the independent, self-reliant and regionally focused foreign policy Wesley calls for.

The Albanese government's objectives in Southeast Asia have been articulated consistently from the moment it took office. Months after the 2022 election, Foreign Minister Wong travelled to Singapore to deliver a speech with a title that closely foreshadowed the subtitle of Blind Spot itself; "A Shared Future: Australia, ASEAN and Southeast Asia." In it, Wong declared that Australia would avoid the "mistake" of viewing Southeast Asia through the lens of the China relationship and would instead engage with the intent of building on shared interests. The objective wasn’t to build a universal strategic outlook on the great powers, but to build a region that works for all Southeast Asian nations, in all of their diversity. Wong expanded on this the following year at the National Press Club, explicitly rejecting the view of Southeast Asia "as a mere theatre for great power competition", a view that she argued, "diminishes the power of each country to engage other than through the prism of a great power."

To this end, the consistent, stated objective of the Albanese government’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia has been to engage with partners in building a region that is peaceful, stable and prosperous. A region governed by agreed rules and norms, where sovereignty is respected, countries are free to make their own choices and where no country dominates and no country is dominated. All the while ensuring that ASEAN remains central to the regional architecture. Measured against these objectives, the influence and effectiveness of the Albanese government in the region looks very different to Wesley's account in Blind Spot.

No other region in the world has received more high-level ministerial attention under the Albanese government. Prime Minister Albanese has visited the region at least seventeen times, including five to Indonesia alone, his most-visited country. Foreign Minister Wong visited every ASEAN country except Myanmar in the government's first year and has now made more than twenty-five visits to ASEAN nations. Deputy Prime Minister Marles has made twenty-two visits. Australian leaders have been showing up in the region in a way they have not done before.

The governments of Southeast Asia have responded enthusiastically. In February 2026 Prime Minister Albanese and President Prabowo signed the Australia-Indonesia Treaty on Common Security, a landmark security agreement that builds on the historic 1995 Agreement on Maintaining Security created by Prime Minister Keating and President Suharto. Indonesia does not have a security agreement at this level with any other country, a sign of the deep personal relationship between leaders and the trust between our governments.

The Treaty has already moved beyond paper: Australia is supporting the development of joint defence training facilities in Indonesia, with Morotai island flagged as a possible site; a senior Indonesian officer at colonel rank has been embedded as deputy commander of Australia's 1st Brigade in Darwin; and the Junior Leaders' Forum Military Education Exchange has been expanded to build the next generation of leaders who know each other. Within weeks of signing, Marles and his Indonesian counterpart agreed to extend the Treaty's logic into new trilateral security arrangements with Japan and Papua New Guinea.

Across the region, Australia has also upgraded bilateral partnerships with Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Laos. Australia strongly supported Timor-Leste’s ASEAN accession, and in 2026, leaders from Australia and Timor-Leste signed a New Partnership for a New Era.

The ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in Melbourne in March 2024, the largest diplomatic gathering Australia had hosted in more than a decade, attended by leaders of all ASEAN nations bar Myanmar, produced concrete outcomes: a $2 billion Southeast Asia Investment Financing Facility, and a $140 million Partnerships for Infrastructure Program.

The Albanese Government also commissioned Nicholas Moore to produce Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy (‘Moore Report’) as a practical roadmap to lift trade and investment engagement with a region projected to become the world's fourth-largest economy by 2040. The Strategy has been actively implemented through new deal teams to support more Australian investment in Southeast Asia, landing pads in Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City to help more Australian start-ups enter the region, and new Southeast Asia business missions that connect more Australian businesses with opportunities in the region. These efforts have already led to record trade and investment results.

The defence relationship tells the same story. Indo-Pacific Endeavour, Australia's flagship annual military engagement activity, deploying ADF ships, aircraft and personnel across Southeast Asia for combined exercises, port visits and capacity building, has grown to 1,800 personnel across fourteen nations under the Albanese government, an increase of more than fifty per cent in participating personnel and double the number of nations from the previous government.

Australia and Indonesia signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement in August 2024. Soon after, Exercise Keris Woomera, a new combined joint exercise, was held for the first time.  It brought together 2,000 Australian and Indonesian personnel in the most complex exercise the two militaries had ever conducted. Vietnam participated in Exercise Kakadu, the Australian navy’s premier multinational exercise in 2024, the first time it had ever participated in an exercise with a Western country, joining the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia as regular participants.

While not engaging in these outcomes directly in Blind Spot, Wesley dismisses accounts like this as "a laundry list of all the initiatives Canberra is pursuing to secure positive relations with its northern neighbours — a long line of security agreements, strategic partnerships and trade agreements." Readers can judge for themselves though whether this record reflects a nation that is isolated, alienated, and whose influence is at an all-time low in the region.

A final measure of effectiveness is how Australia's experience with China is perceived in the region. Wesley acknowledges that the Albanese government "successfully reset relations with Beijing" and resumed high-level dialogue. He then dismisses this as cosmetic and declares the China-threat posture "bipartisan." This is not how it registers across the region. Over the past five years I have travelled regularly as a representative of the Australian government across Southeast Asia. A consistent feature of these engagements has been the interest from regional interlocutors in the way that the Albanese government has stabilised its relationship with China through deliberate, patient, calibrated diplomacy. Far from being seen as isolated and irrelevant, there is significant interest in the region in the way the Albanese government has navigated these geostrategic challenges without compromising on its national interests.

Blind Spot is at its strongest when it focuses its attention not on the region, but within Australia itself. While the Australian government’s engagement with Southeast Asia has never been more active, the undeniable reality is that this enthusiasm is not being replicated in Australian schools, universities and businesses. Wesley correctly identifies a rising "incuriousness about the societies and cultures closest to us geographically" and is right to call for greater understanding of the history, religion, cultures and politics of Southeast Asia in response.

If anything, Blind Spot undersells this problem. The Parliamentary inquiry I chair into Australia’s Asia Capability has heard evidence that Southeast Asian language enrolments at Australian universities fell 75 per cent between 2004 and 2022 and that fewer than 500 domestic students studied Bahasa Indonesia in 2023. Experts project that Indonesian language teaching will reach functional extinction in Australian schools by 2031; within the next term of government.

As our region becomes more complex and consequential, Wesley is right to argue that Australia needs to "invest heavily in deepening its understanding of the countries to our north" and develop "skills of geopolitical empathy." We need more Australians with the lived experiences and deep expertise necessary to be effective in Southeast Asia. This is why the first recommendation of the Moore Report was the development of a whole of nation plan to boost Southeast Asian literacy.

Revitalising Australia’s institutions for understanding our region, and teaching new generations of young Australians about it, is a strategic imperative that deserves as much attention as any other vital sovereign capability. Unless we address this blind spot within our own borders, future Australian leaders won’t have the capability to be influential in our own region - whether they want to be or not.