Gareth Evans gives Julie Bishop a diplomatic serve over Cambodia
It is hard to get present day Labor politicians to lift their interest in matters of foreign policy past comments about the damage that asylum seeker policy is doing to relations with Indonesia. Even the remarkable flirtation Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had with her Cambodian counterpart over his country taking some of the Australia bound regimes could not stir an interest. So enter Gareth Evans, Foreign Minister under Hawke and Keating, to remind us that the Labor Party once had principles. “Cambodia’s government has been getting away with murder,” wrote Evans ,who is now Chancellor of the Australian National University, in an article published in today’s Phnom Penh Post and available on the Project Syndicate website. ” For far too long, Hun Sen and his colleagues have been getting away with violence, human-rights abuses, corruption, and media and electoral manipulation without serious internal or external challenge.” And the man who played a major role in the Cambodian pea