Australia can’t be naive about human trafficking in Asia

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s visit to Thailand to announce Australia’s support for a new training centre to counter human trafficking is, on the surface, a savvy move in her efforts to engage better with the region. 

In reality, it is the latest demonstration of Australia’s naivete about authoritarian regimes in the region and of the Australian “bubble” — as well as the Canberra “bubble” that lies within that. The truth is that the military and security forces, such as Thailand’s police force and its ruling military, play an often central role in human trafficking across the region. Thailand is not the only offender here, of course; its neighbours Myanmar and Cambodia are also in the main group of offenders, as is the generally corrupt Malaysia.

All four countries are on Tier 2 or Tier 3 of the US government’s annual rankings in its Trafficking in Persons report. Tier 2 countries are not fully compliant but are making “significant efforts” to be compliant with minimum standards, while Tier 3 countries are those whose governments do not fully meet the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.

Thailand was previously on the Tier 3 watchlist but has managed to lift itself to Tier 2 by making “significant efforts”, the report noted.

About Myanmar, it said: “During the reporting period, the military continued a policy or pattern of use of children and adults for forced labour.”

In terms of concrete examples of uniformed involvement in the people trade, one is close to home. In late 2015, Thai Police major general Paween Pongsirin, who had headed an investigation into human trafficking for the country’s military government, fled claiming political asylum in Australia. He had been investigating the trafficking of Muslim Rohingya migrants after mass graves were discovered Thailand in mid May 2015.

“A lot of government officials should be facing justice,” Pongsirin told the ABC at the time. “There are good soldiers but the police and the military are involved in running the human trafficking. Unfortunately the bad police and the bad military are the ones that have power.”

This sentiment has been grimly echoed across the region’s borders, including its extensive ones with China over recent decades and doubtless further into the past.

Human trafficking, mainly for sex, marriage and labour, is a tragic trade that deeply affects both victims and their families and friends for life. It is rife across South and South-East Asia and the statistics are horrifying. 

The recent Global Estimates of Modern Slavery report estimated there are 49.6 million people living in modern slavery on any given day, either coerced to work against their will or in a forced marriage. Of these, compelled labour accounts for 27.6 million of those in modern slavery and forced marriage for 22 million, or nearly one of every 150 people in the world. The problem is getting worse with the 2021 figures, which show about 10 million more men, women and children have been forced to work or marry in the period since the previous estimates were released in 2017. 

Wong’s visit, where she met with Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, is the latest attempt to slowly repair Australia’s relationship with Thailand, which blew up in the aftermath of the 2014 coup led by Chan-ocha. Australia was out of the blocks too fast, downgrading diplomatic ties, imposing a travel ban on the junta leaders and cutting defence cooperation — seemingly unaware that the coup was part of Thai political life. Chan-ocha’s coup was the 12th successful coup since the country instituted constitutional monarchy in 1932.

They were some of the toughest measures taken against Thailand and left Australia somewhat isolated. In retrospect they would become something of a template for the megaphone diplomacy of the 2013-2022 Coalition years that frustrated diplomats on the ground in Asia. Such actions are further demonstrations of the Australia/Canberra bubble. They are also a demonstration of Australia’s often politically motivated short-termism, of seeing its regional relationships as more transactional to suit the government of the day, rather than a relationship viewed through the longer lens of history, which is the perspective that Asian cultures tend to take.

Australia’s commitment to fighting the horrors of human trafficking in the region over many years has been admirable. It’s in Australia’s interests to do as much as it can for purely humane reasons as well as self-interest, as victims of the trade continue to leak over our borders, facilitating the heinous practices here.

Yet keen observers of the region feared that the latest initiative of the vaunted “first of its kind” training centre could be like “inviting Dracula to the blood bank”, where potentially corrupt uniformed officials can understand the methods being used to trap them.

It would be interesting to know if Pongsirin’s case, or dozens of others across the years where military and police officers have been involved in human trafficking in South-East Asia, was in Wong’s briefing notes.

Hopefully Australia’s efforts to combat human trafficking are bearing some fruit, but the reality of the regimes that we “partner” with needs to be acknowledged, maybe not publicly but in serious private conversations.