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

Yes, we will support them. A suggestion, by the way, that India is a country that cannot be trusted because it will proliferate nuclear weapons is not a suggestion that I suspect is welcome in New Delhi. Neither is it a fair criticism of the Indian government nor the Indian parliament, because India does not have a record for being a nuclear proliferator.

The Labor Party wants to replace the strong relationships that this government has studiously built over the last 11 years with its curiously described notion of liberal multilateralism. Everything will have to be decided by the United Nations and by the General Assembly. You are basically saying that you will contract out our foreign policy and we will give the French, the Russians, the Chinese as well as the Americans and the British a veto—any one of them—over what we might want to do. When you are operating in a difficult international economic environment you need those strong relationships with key countries. I do not think the Secretary-General of the United Nations is going to be able to help deal with some of these very difficult international economic issues, even with the best will in the world and all the determination he can muster. This is a country that needs a common-sense and practical foreign policy and not some sort of head-in-the-air kind of theoretical foreign policy articulated by the Leader of the Opposition and built around some construct of liberal multilateralism—some concept from a textbook years old and very dusty.

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