Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in this discussion, but it is a rather strange piece of timing by the shadow minister that leads me to do so. After all the time that the parliament has been sitting, we get an MPI from the shadow minister for foreign affairs when he knows that both the cabinet ministers in the portfolio are overseas. It does not give great confidence in his capacity to lead the discussion. But we are quite happy to take it on.

There is another very interesting element in how this MPI came about. I think that if the Speaker did a forensic assessment he would find that there is actually an old signature overwritten and the member for Goldstein’s put in its place. I am sure that when I was on the tactics committee for the opposition we drafted exactly the same thing. We must have left it behind in the tactics committee room and they found it after all this time and thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ and Andrew signed it and sent it in!

What it describes, if you take a step back 12 months, is the situation of foreign policy failure in this region by the previous government which we have taken six months to fix. I noticed of course that, while the MPI refers to the Asia-Pacific, the shadow minister did not mention the Pacific once. It is not surprising. Our relationships with all the countries in the Pacific were in chaos. I will leave my colleague the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs to deal with that in greater detail, but they were in chaos. And we have taken a long time to start to turn around the damage that was done by the arrogance, ignorance and incompetence of the previous government.

It has taken us six months to repair a large number of our international relationships. It did not take us very long because we started by signing the Kyoto protocol, which changed the perception of countries in our region about our willingness to carry our share of the burden and participate. It did not take us very long because, apparently unbeknownst to the shadow minister, the Prime Minister made his first overseas visit to Asia to Indonesia and had a very good meeting with President Yudhoyono, who of course he knows quite well. That has substantially enhanced the character and standing of our relationship with that crucially important neighbour, Indonesia.

I do not feel the slightest need to be defensive about foreign policy issues when comparing the performance of this government over six months with the 12 years of our predecessors—12 years that included the greatest foreign policy failure of a modern Australian government: the commitment to the war in Iraq and the insidious influence that had on our relationships with countries throughout the region who made their judgements about us by the character of that commitment. I am very proud of the foreign policy progress we have made in the region and more broadly. I want particularly to talk about the relationship with China and the relative capacity of any government to have a good relationship with China at the same time as we have a good relationship with Japan and India.

I want first, though, to go to this extraordinary proposition that somehow or other the previous government was passionately committed to the quadrilateral arrangement and that we no longer are. Strangely, on 9 July last year the then Minister for Defence, Dr Nelson, said that he had assured his Chinese counterpart that Australia was not interested in forming a security pact with Japan, the United States and India as a regional buffer to China. He said:

I have explained the nature of, and basis of, our trilateral strategic dialogue with Japan and the United States. But I have also reassured China that so-called quadrilateral dialogue with India is not something that we are pursuing.

Didn’t the leader tell you that is what he said? Hasn’t he told you that he said you did not support it? Are you saying that the leader forgot to tell you that he does not support that dialogue? Then again, on 8 September the foreign minister said—

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