DECEMBER 2 — Natural disasters across Southeast Asia in November 2025 have delivered a sobering message: Asean cannot handle the next decade alone. 

Barely weeks after the Asean and Related Summits concluded, the region was struck by severe monsoon floods in Thailand, cyclones in the Philippines, landslides in Vietnam, and rising flood risks in Malaysia. 

The scale is frightening because the pattern is no longer episodic—it is systemic. Weather disruptions are arriving in unrelenting cycles, stretching national disaster infrastructures beyond their limits.

If there was ever a moment for Asean to rethink the meaning of partnership, it is now. 

And no partnership has been as misunderstood—yet as valuable—as the one Asean shares with Australia, including through Australia’s international development arm, AusAID, and the longstanding Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA).

For decades, the FPDA has been treated as a quiet military mechanism, occasionally referenced but rarely central in strategic debates. AusAID, meanwhile, has operated as an important but under-recognised development partner. 

Today, the region can no longer afford to keep these mechanisms at the periphery of its security and humanitarian imagination.

Asean’s disaster reality: AHA centre is not enough

The Asean Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre) was conceived as the institutional backbone of regional disaster response. 

It has achieved some successes—rapid mobilisation during typhoons, coordinated logistics, and information exchange—but its structural constraints are too obvious to ignore.

AHA Centre has no real-time satellite capabilities of its own. It depends heavily on member states to provide data, even when some national agencies lack the most basic early-warning systems. 

The AHA Centre’s Emergency Response and Assessment Team (ERAT) is composed of trained personnel, but they are chronically under-deployed, under-funded, and politically constrained by Asean’s rigid interpretation of “non-interference.”

This makes the AHA Centre reactive, not preventive—useful only after destruction has occurred.

The November 2025 disasters proved this once again. Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam were forced to fall back on their own national agencies, foreign support, and ad hoc coordination because AHA cannot surge capacity across multiple concurrent emergencies.

In short: AHA is limp not because it lacks potential, but because Asean has never empowered it structurally.

This is where Australia—and FPDA—must be taken seriously.

Australia’s strategic value: Not about geopolitics, but human security

Australia is Southeast Asia’s closest developed neighbour. Its satellites monitor weather patterns across the Indo-Pacific. Its defence force has some of the most advanced HADR assets—heavy-lift transport, naval logistics, air mobility, and engineering units. 

Its development arm, AusAID, has decades of experience supporting climate resilience, food security, and health systems across the region.

Australia does not need to be invited to lecture Asean on geopolitics; what Asean needs is Australia’s ability to reinforce regional resilience.

Three elements stand out:

1. Satellite early warning systems

Australia’s meteorological agencies already collaborate with Southeast Asian counterparts, but the cooperation is too thin. Asean’s inability to track storms forming in the Indian Ocean or Pacific in real time is a glaring weakness. 

AusAID and Australia’s CSIRO can fill this gap with integrated monitoring platforms linked directly to Asean national disaster agencies.

2. Emergency air and sea support

During cyclones, floods, and landslides, the bottleneck is not knowledge—it is movement. Only Australia and the FPDA states possess the heavy-lift helicopters, amphibious landing ships, and transport aircraft that can move people rapidly from danger zones to safe zones.

3. Climate-linked Infrastructure

Australia’s development investments in climate adaptation—flood-resistant housing, coastal reinforcement, and green energy grids—address the structural risks Asean continues to ignore. These are the areas where Asean must deepen cooperation, not hesitate.

FPDA: A quiet but crucial security net

The FPDA, formed in 1971 between Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, is one of the oldest non-Nato security arrangements still active. Though it was designed for territorial defence, it has increasingly taken on HADR dimensions. 

FPDA’s command structures, interoperability, and communication networks give it an advantage no Asean mechanism can match.

FPDA is valuable for five reasons:

1. Interoperability – Its forces train yearly in exercises that include air defence, maritime coordination, and disaster response.

2. Rapid Deployment – Assets can be mobilised without the slow bureaucratic negotiation that often paralyses Asean.

3. Non-Provocative – FPDA is defensive, not directed at China or any regional power.

4. Professional Standards – Training builds capacity among younger Asean officers.

5. Historical Continuity – FPDA has endured shifts in global politics because it is grounded in operational necessity, not ideology.

Asean should not pretend that FPDA exists outside its security environment. 

If anything, FPDA is part of Asean’s wider ecosystem, enhancing regional stability without demanding political alignment.

Why now? Because Northeast Asia cannot help Asean

Asean’s external environment in 2025 is troubling.

China and Japan are increasingly trapped in their own rivalry—diplomatic, economic, and technological. Japan’s political stance on Taiwan has hardened under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, provoking sharper responses from Beijing. 

South Korea’s executive branch remains internally fragile, struggling to mobilise national consensus even on basic foreign policy priorities.

These Northeast Asian dynamics mean one thing: Asean cannot rely on its Northeast partners when simultaneous crises unfold.

Asean needs partners who are stable, consistent, and willing to commit practical resources—not rhetorical support.

That partner is Australia.

Reimagining Asean regionalism through real capabilities

If Asean is serious about resilience, climate adaptation, and HADR capacity, it must:

• integrate Australian satellite data into the AHA Centre;
• formalise FPDA support for regional disaster operations;
• establish permanent joint HADR exercises involving Asean, FPDA states, and Australia’s Defence Force;
• build new Asean–Australia climate infrastructure financing frameworks;
• expand AusAID technical assistance to Asean’s least-prepared states.

This is not “alignment.” It is responsibility.

Asean’s credibility as a regional organisation will not be judged by grand summits or communiqués. 

It will be judged by how quickly it acts when citizens are trapped on rooftops, when floodwaters rise, when storms intensify in hours instead of days.

Australia and the FPDA give Asean what it currently lacks: capacity, speed, and consistency.

It is time for Asean to treat them not as optional partners, but as essential pillars of regional security.

* Phar Kim Beng is Professor of Asean Studies, Director Institute of International and Asean Studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. 

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.