Former Australian PM knocks U.S. focus

SYDNEY, May 21 (Reuters) -- Australia must not be seen as a U.S. lackey in Asia and should be more independent on a range of issues from missile defence and the environment to Taiwan, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has said.

Fraser, dubbed the conscience of Australian conservatives, called for a re-evaluation of the relevance of the ANZUS military pact with the United States, and for a redefinition of Australia's strategic interests to focus on relations with Asia.

"We can't and should not . . . just seek to please the United States.

"We have to analyse what's in our own interest and our own interest has to be significantly related to our region," Fraser told Reuters in a telephone interview from his home in Melbourne on Monday.

Prime Minister from 1975 to 1983, Fraser said Australia was wrong to back U.S. President George W. Bush's plans to develop a multibillion-dollar National Missile Defence and Washington's rejection of the 1997 Kyoto protocol on climate change.

"We shouldn't be supporting America on such issues," he said.

Missile shield

Australia is among the few U.S. allies vocally backing a missile shield. China is furiously opposed.

Prime Minister John Howard, like Fraser a member of Australia's Liberal Party, also says he sympathises with Bush's refusal to ratify the Kyoto pact, under which industrialised nations agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Japan, where the agreement was reached, has urged Bush to reconsider. The perception that Australia is only too keen to echo U.S. positions was further underscored when Howard supported Bush's assertion that U.S. forces would defend Taiwan against attack by China, which regards the island as a renegade province.

Howard won a sharp rebuke from the Chinese embassy for that.

Unsettling the status quo

Fraser said that Bush's comments, last month's standoff when a U.S. spy plane landed on Hainan island after colliding with a Chinese fighter and other events were unsettling the status quo that has held conflict in the Taiwan Strait at bay for 50 years.

"Therefore it's increasingly important for countries that are concerned for stability in the whole region I think to press their views on the United States.

"If they're not the same as America's views, we ought to be saying so," he said.

Fraser said Canberra should clearly state it would not fight over Taiwan, and that it did not back an independent Taiwan. "If a couple of giants are going to have a stoush, a stoush which incidentally I don't believe the United States would end up winning, it doesn't make sense for a country like Australia to be caught in the middle." A staunchly conservative leader best remembered for his catchphrase "life wasn't meant to be easy," Fraser said he was disturbed that China, Japan and the 10-nation ASEAN group were arranging currency swaps without including Australia.

One day, the swaps could be the basis of an Asian Monetary Fund to rival the Western-led International Monetary Fund.

Australia may have been excluded because of a belief it put its ties to the United States above Southeast Asia, Fraser said.

At the heart of the U.S.-Australian alliance lies the ANZUS treaty, signed together with New Zealand after World War Two.

New Zealand was suspended from ANZUS in the mid-1980s over its anti-nuclear warship ban.

Fraser said the the ANZUS treaty made sense during the Cold War when there was a clear threat from communist ideology.

But times had changed and Australia should make sure that ANZUS would not commit it to take part in any potential clash between U.S. forces and China over Taiwan.

"I do not advocate tearing up the alliance," Fraser said.

"But I believe within the alliance we need to define those things where we have an interest and those things that might be regarded as the American interest, and the most sensitive of those is obviously Taiwan."