Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for all his questions. We have until 11.40, so I will leave time for other members to raise issues they might want to raise. I will go through these things very quickly and no doubt inadequately. First of all, I will look at the questions about the AWB matter. The honourable member started his comments by asking whether the department will be conducting an investigation into fraud within the department. That really took me aback a bit. That is an allegation that people in my department were involved in fraud. I wrote down what the honourable member said. If that is what he means, there has been a royal commission into this matter. As I said, I would recommend he not just glance at it and listen to his leader’s fanciful allegations but read it.

As far as Australia working with the Americans in the Asia-Pacific region is concerned, I was in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago and our relationship there works as well as it has ever worked in modern history—since 1945. We have a very intimate relationship with the Americans working in South-East Asia in particular. Some of the great successes, for example, in the area of counterterrorism—obviously, because these are sensitive matters, without getting into any of the details—would not have been possible without the excellent cooperation between Australia and the United States. I often make this point to people, particularly people on the left, who say that they do not think we should be so close to the United States and that we are too close to the Bush regime and so on. If you want to deal with the issue of terrorism in South-East Asia, you need good, strong bilateral relations with countries like Indonesia and the Philippines and you need to be working with them. But you also need a close relationship with the Americans. You need to be able to influence American policy in South-East Asia. Bagging the Americans would probably somewhat reduce your influence in South-East Asia. I suspect that you would find that, should you win the election.

As far as East Timor goes, I thank the honourable member for asking this question. There will be an election in East Timor on 30 June. If I were the honourable member, I would watch the election process and not get into the game of reacting to every proposal that has been put forward by politicians in the context of an election in East Timor—though that might not necessarily be so true of Australia. Anyway, surely none of us would comment on that.

In the case of East Timor, the parliamentary elections—which, in a way, are the most important elections—are on 30 June. The leaders of the different political parties are putting forward various proposals, some of which are, frankly, ambit claims. For example, the proposal that East Timor would build up a defence force of 3,000 and have naval vessels with missiles on them is not part of the planning that is being done at the moment for the next three-year evolution of the East Timor defence force. This is a debate which needs to be understood in the context of the circumstances of East Timor at the moment. East Timor simply will not have, at any time in the immediate future, the resources to deal with that.

I would recommend that the honourable member have a good look at some of the activities of the governments of the Solomon Islands and Fiji. I would not want, if I were the honourable member, to put myself in the position where I was somehow a bit of an apologist for Manasseh Sogavare and Commodore Bainimarama. I am happy for the Labor Party to put itself in that position if it wants to, but it seems to me that that is not smart. To know all is to understand all. To know what these people have been doing, to know what their ambitions are, is to understand why the Australian government holds very strong views about them. It is fair enough, I suppose, for an opposition—I think I may have done some of the same things in opposition in the past, to be quite honest about this—to suggest that, ‘Gee, if we were the government, we would have better relations with Sogavare because we would be able to handle it so well. We wouldn’t have published an open letter in the newspaper.’ You would just do what he wanted you to do, would you? Is that the policy? If the opposition were the government and they did what Mr Sogavare wanted them to do then I do not think that would be in Australia’s interests.

You do learn in public life sometimes that you should stand up for what you think is right, and sometimes that involves a bit of an argument with someone. Just because you are having an argument with someone does not mean that that is a bad thing. Sometimes that is a good thing. RAMSI still exists. RAMSI still has integrity. RAMSI is still in place, and it would not be if we had not taken a strong stand in the way we have done. Sure, that has involved some arguments with the Solomon Islands. The opposition thinks that it is wrong to argue with them. The right policy, therefore, must be to go along with what they want. I reckon that is wrong.

We have a bad relationship with the Fiji government because it is an illegal dictatorship, in effect—a military dictatorship. We did our best, as did New Zealand, the United States, the UK and the European Union, to try to persuade Commodore Bainimarama not to mount a coup. So did plenty of people. I think we should keep the pressure up on Commodore Bainimarama. If the opposition policy is to do anything else—which I suspect it probably isn’t—I think it would be the wrong policy.

Of course we participate in multilateral institutions. We are a member of the United Nations. I enjoy my five-day visit to the General Assembly every year. We have a very active engagement with the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. But we are basically focused on outcomes, not on process. Process is fine and process is part of life, but if diplomacy were just about process and all we wanted to do was have a kind of merry little relationship in multilateral institutions with New Zealand and Canada—which is apparently the opposition’s policy—I do not think we would get terribly good outcomes. We are getting good outcomes in counterterrorism in Indonesia not because we are having a great gabfest in the United Nations or because we have some fantastic liberal multilateralist initiative. We are actually having success with the Indonesians and the Filipinos in the area of counterterrorism because we work bilaterally with them. We are focused on outcomes.

I do not have time to go through all the list, but there is a long list of various things that Australia has done in response to avian flu. I hosted a meeting of APEC health ministers in Brisbane to develop an APEC program for addressing avian flu. If the honourable member cares to go back and have a look at the conclusions of, I think, the 2005 APEC summit, he will see that APEC put together what I thought was a very effective response to the issue of avian flu. A tremendous amount of work is being done on avian flu. We, of course, are spending an enormous amount of money helping countries in the region. I have seen a few press releases and speeches on this from the honourable member. I would say that, whilst he is right to draw attention to the issue of avian flu, and Australia should be doing everything it can to try to at least contribute to addressing that issue in the region, that work is all being done.

Finally, I will address the issue of the tsunami. A lot of Australians put their own money into aid going to people in Indonesia and the victims of the tsunami. Off the top of my head, I think it was about $350 million of community money, quite apart from the more than $1 billion the Australian government put in. I set up a working group with the major NGOs to monitor how that money is being spent. We had six-monthly press conferences and meetings and we published reports on how that money was being spent and distributed and what the challenges and benefits are. I do not have time to talk about it any further, but I commend to the honourable member those reports and other material produced by AusAID on the success of the AusAID programs in response to the tsunami. I think it has worked pretty well. I do not think it is true that our response was in any way uncoordinated or ineffective. It was incredibly well coordinated, including coordination with the United States, Japan and the United Nations. There were phone hook-ups from time to time with Colin Powell, the then Japanese foreign minister, the head of OCHA and the United Nations to make sure that we were coordinated. (Time expired)

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