Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Given the Prime Minister has already spent 10 days overseas in his first four months in office and is due to leave for an 18-day trip, including four days in China, why is the Prime Minister not spending even one hour in Japan, Australia’s largest export market?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the question from the Leader of the Opposition. I would have thought the first responsibility of a government of any political persuasion is to ensure that our principal foreign relationships are in good working order. Therefore, one of the first decisions undertaken by this government, within a week or so of taking office, was to travel to Indonesia. For what purpose? To ratify the Kyoto protocol, something which I seem to recall it took you a long, long time not to do.

The second decision that the government took was to visit Dili in East Timor. That was important because, when it came to the challenges of security for that country and the further deployment of military personnel and police personnel, it was absolutely the responsible thing to do to assist our nearest neighbour in need. Then it came to our neighbourhood—that is, the South Pacific—which the honourable member for Mayo has displayed such a comprehensive lack of interest in for the last decade or so.

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And I can report to the honourable member for Mayo that he is deeply missed across the South Pacific. They were constantly inquiring after the honourable member’s wellbeing. When you arrive at an extraordinarily unsustainable situation of a ban on ministerial contact between Australian government ministers and Papua New Guinea, our nearest neighbour to our north—and that ban had proceeded for virtually a year—it is not the way in which this government proposes to do business with its neighbours.

The purpose of a visit to Papua New Guinea and to Goroka and to the Solomons, where we still have several hundred troops and police deployed, was to rebuild bridges with our principal partners within the South Pacific and also to look firsthand at what was necessary to deal with the challenges of development in the South Pacific, where most of the development indicators are headed in the reverse direction. That answers the first part of the question about what official travel has been engaged in by me as Prime Minister since the change of government.

As far as upcoming travel is concerned, as soon as I became Prime Minister, the Ambassador of the United States came to see me and said that the President would like me to pay an early visit to Washington. We then began negotiations with the United States about when that could occur and the dates were arranged. In addition, our friends in China—our largest trading partner—discussed dates and suggested that we would need to ensure that a visit was undertaken well short of the Olympics because there would be a crowd of visits as they got near to the Olympics.

The third element in the equation was a decision relating to our troops deployed in Afghanistan. That goes to NATO strategy for the deployment of troops in Afghanistan and the upcoming NATO summit, which is to be held in Bucharest. That has a fixed date; it occurs early next month. If you put the three together, it defines the architecture of the visits abroad. That is why they are being undertaken.

As for the final part of the honourable member’s question, concerning our friends and partners in Japan, in the period that the government has been in office Japan has been the kind host of visits by the foreign minister, the trade minister, the minister for industry and the minister for resources. There have been four ministerial visits. I do not think that any of these ministers have yet travelled to China. I may be wrong.

The priority we attach to our relationship with Japan is underpinned by the fact that these ministers have seen an absolute necessity of making early contact with their Japanese ministerial counterparts. Furthermore, the Japanese have been in contact with us over a long period of time about an invitation for me as Prime Minister to attend the G8 meeting to be held in Tokyo in July. They have indicated that they want to have bilateral discussions and meetings with me on that occasion. On top of that, we are in continued negotiations and discussions about a further bilateral visit by me to Japan.

Where does all this come together? If honourable members opposite have paid close attention to the state of the global economy, they will know that we are travelling in uncertain economic times globally. It is of deep importance, therefore, that at the level of Prime Minister of Australia we have direct dealings with the Americans, who are currently engaged in very difficult decisions concerning the health and robustness and state of US financial markets and upcoming actions both by the US Treasury and the US Fed. Similarly, developments in the City of London, affected by decisions undertaken by the Bank of England, are important in terms of our current global economic circumstances, as are the upcoming economic developments in China, our principal trading partner, with whom we have a deep and vested interest to ensure that that export relationship is expanded further. It is because the economic interests of this nation are at the forefront of the government’s attention that we have embarked upon this visit, and I am actually surprised that the Leader of the Opposition would choose, in a partisan nature, to engage in an attack on it.