Australia’s most senior diplomat, Frances Adamson, speaks to Laura Tingle

FRANCES ADAMSON, OUTGOING DFAT SECRETARY: Tony Abbott as prime minister, visiting in 2014. We were in the Forbidden City. I think it was a Saturday afternoon.

LAURA TINGLE, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Few Australians have had quite such a front row seat on Australia’s rapidly evolving relationship with China.

REPORTER: Mr Carr’s visit has been carefully choreographed.

LAURA TINGLE: As ambassador to Beijing from 2011 to 2015, as the prime ministerial advisor, then as head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the last decade of Frances Adamson’s career has been dominated by the new superpower.

When she leaves her current job this week, she will be leaving a diplomatic world that has changed significantly since she began working in the department in 1985.

Frances Adamson, thanks for talking to us today and congratulations on a stellar diplomatic career.

The world has changed and the way we communicate has changed. How has that changed the job of a diplomat?

FRANCES ADAMSON: I think it has made it both easier and more complicated in some respects because the traditional diplomatic trade craft, if you like, the things that are hundreds of years old, the sending of third person notes and those things still happen, but on the top of it, of course, you’ve got social media, you’ve got the ability for leaders to text each other directly and they do or to pick up the telephone and call each other directly without the use of the White House assistance operations, Downing Street switchboard, any of those things, they can just do it.

LAURA TINGLE: Those interactions between leaders have also changed with COVID.

FRANCES ADAMSON: I think last year Prime Minister Morrison had over 130 conversations with or video conferences with counterparts.

Now for a country like Australia, that was a tremendous levelling of the playing field because otherwise we have got to get on the plane and very travel long distances.

LAURA TINGLE: Is there some trademark of Australian diplomacy that’s different from the way other people work around the world, do you think?

FRANCES ADAMSON: One of them I think, and we really emphasise the importance of this, is an ability to listen particularly in our own region.

You really have to work hard to avoid breaking a silence, finishing someone else’s sentence. Just listening, feeling comfortable with extended pauses is something that I think we can and do do. It is not always done well by those from outside the region who aren’t as familiar with it as we are.

LAURA TINGLE: In a region where Australia has been often been regarded as a European outsider or even at risk of becoming the poor white thrash of Asia, Adamson has seen a major shift in the willingness of South-East Asian nations to engage – motivated by China but also by a changing view of Australia.

FRANCES ADAMSON: ASEAN is absolutely central to the future of the Indo-Pacific. I see them reaching out to us as much as we’re reaching out to them and I think a moment that I would mention was the 2018 ASEAN-Australian summit which Malcolm Turnbull hosted in Sydney.

MALCOLM TURNBULL (2018): We want to have a region where the big fish do not eat the little fish, and the little fish, the shrimp.

FRANCES ADAMSON: I was in what is called the listening room as a senior official at the dining room at Admiralty House. I was just listening in and I was really struck, this is a real discussion between leaders who are bringing a real sense of their countries interests and a real sense of appreciation of what Australia is doing and a willingness to continue to work with us in deeper ways to help secure that mutual objective.

LAURA TINGLE: So we’re sort of entrenched in the region at last?

FRANCES ADAMSON: I think so.

LAURA TINGLE: Recent comments by Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo warning that the drums of war were beating drew criticism that foreign policy has been hijacked by nation’s hawkish intelligence community. What would your response to that be?

FRANCES ADAMSON: I don’t agree with it obviously. I mean I’m in the rooms where the discussions take place and I think we’ve, as a nation, needed to respond to more challenging strategic circumstances.

It is a tremendous time for diplomacy. There is a real need for diplomacy to be in the forefront of our responses. We are the sharp eyes, the attuned ears and the influential voice of Australia overseas.

LAURA TINGLE: The wisdom of Australia going on the front foot in criticisms of China including over the origins of COVID has also been questioned.

FRANCES ADAMSON: I do think that it would have not been responsible for an Australian Government to let these things go by without seeking to address them.

LAURA TINGLE: So you don’t accept the view that the wheels have fallen off the Australia-China relationship, for example?

FRANCES ADAMSON: No, absolutely not. I think we’re engaged in a longer term debate, discussion, determining of what our by bilateral relationship is going to look like, but obviously that won’t happen until China decides it is ready and when they do, it won’t just be because of Australia, it will be because they’re hearing from a broad range of countries that actually each one of them has their own interests that they want to seek to defend and they’re not prepared to pay a price and be beholden to someone else.

LAURA TINGLE: Adamson’s fluent Mandarin and postings in Hong Kong and Taipei as well as Beijing, have given her a particularly acute view of the Chinese and how they see themselves as much as the view of our relationship.

FRANCES ADAMSON: I think the longer you work with the Chinese and come to understand them, you can see that there is an insecurity and to some extent what Beijing is looking for is a regional order centred on Beijing, where countries make their own decisions, not just in the light of their own national interests but factoring in what Beijing would like them to do.

I think there is no reason why the Chinese people shouldn’t feel confident to take their place as a major power in the community of nations, but to do so in a way that absolutely respects the rights of smaller countries.

That’s their language, but if you look at it in practise, in the reality, that’s not what happens and all of us, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, we want those things, all of us actually, to be settled in accordance with international law with rules, with norms, not on the basis of the exercise of power.

LAURA TINGLE: Thanks so much for talking to us.

FRANCES ADAMSON: A pleasure, Laura.