Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister inform the House about any new thinking on developing stronger links throughout the Asia-Pacific region?

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

The government was elected on a platform of delivering responsible economic management, of assisting families, working Australians, pensioners and carers under financial pressure, and also of planning for Australia’s long-term future. The government is planning for the future of our infrastructure, planning for the future of our health and hospital system, planning for the future of our education system but also planning for Australia’s future in our own immediate region.

When it comes to our future in the Asia-Pacific region we in this country face, in the 21st century, the Asia-Pacific region becoming the centre of global economic power and progressively the centre of global strategic power. Therefore, we have a challenge on our hands. We either allow the future to wash over us or seek to engage, plan and shape the future to the best interests of Australian families and Australian working people. The most core interest which every Australian in every constituency represented in this House has is: how do we ensure that Australia operates in a regional environment of peace and security into the century?

Right now in the Asia-Pacific region we do not have a body which brings together a common security dialogue, a basis of common security cooperation between the major powers of our wider region—the United States, China, Japan, Indonesia and India. It is time Australia began to shape this agenda, which is why this government has put forward a proposal that we should have an ambition for the region to create an Asia-Pacific community which can, for the first time, have a pan-regional dialogue on the question of our common security. We should not succumb to the inevitability, as some suggest, that there is some real, long-term prospect of war within our region without putting in place mechanisms to ameliorate that risk.

Furthermore, on the economic agenda, we must ensure that we have the best mechanism possible to bring about free trade across our wider region. We have a series of bilateral free trade agreements which perform a function. We have negotiations underway through the World Trade Organisation at present. But right now across the Asia-Pacific region there is a great danger that we will end up with a bowl of spaghetti rather than an integrated set of free trade agreements of the type that the President of the United States is advocating.

Beyond that, what we need across the Asia-Pacific region is increasing counterdisaster cooperation. Most recently we have seen extraordinary natural disasters in Burma and China. As a region, we need to make sure we have a capacity to respond to these disasters when they occur in a timely fashion so that the region can work as one in dealing with what is increasingly a grave threat to the peoples of our wider region.

On the matter which has been the subject of the most recent question, and discussion in the House before with ministerial statements, climate change, we need also a body which works across the Asia-Pacific region, where China and India loom as enormous, long-term emitters, making an enormous long-term contribution to the overall effect of global warming. We must have a mechanism to engage them within our wider region.

So what is the government’s proposal? The government’s proposal is not simply to allow the region to drift. The government’s proposal is not simply to allow regional organisations to crop up one after another and not in a properly coordinated fashion. The government’s ambition is this: let us, Australia, in partnership with our friends and allies across the region, work towards an ambition of bringing about an Asia-Pacific century. Those opposite may deride that as a legitimate ambition for Australia. We on this side of the House do not.

In terms of our country’s long-term security interests, economic interests, trade interests, environment interests, the way in which we manage our investment interests and the handling of natural disasters in our part of the world, making sure that we have the most effective regional cooperation arrangements in a body which, once and for all, brings the United States, China and India into a common body to shape our world, our region’s future, is the government’s ambition. I invite those opposite to support that ambition.