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United States will surge again
and we're going to be more intertwined with the United States
the stats are starting to show up
a funny thing when you looked around Australian universities we were
replete with magnificent Asian Studies centres
and centres focused on particular countries all sub regions within Asia
and we have in this country a really major level
of expertise on the area around us. It's one of the things that makes us a very
worthwhile ally
for anyone who thinks they've got serious interest in this area
but one thing we did not have was anything devoted or any centre
devoted to the study of their principal ally and given that
Americans think so differently from us. Given that their
social structure is so different from ours
given that the ideological underpinnings of their politics
are so different from ours not to understand that and the forces involved
in
all those cultural and philosophical dissimilarities
the forces involved in that in determining the way in which the United
States thinks about the world
is for an ally who very firmly understands
that our national security is deeply bound up in the United States
it is a glaring chasm in
the development of our public policy so establishing the Centre
has been very important and wonderful too that
an outreach for that Centre has been established here in Western Australia
and the focus of that outreach is the
interaction between the relationship we have with the United States and the
region around us
There is no more appropriate place in Australia
to do that study from than here in
Western Australia. A very good development and Stephen Smith had a lot to do with that
and he should be praised and thanked for that too
I want to thank Stephen Smith again for the
for the job he gave me. What a privilege it's being these last
four years to witness
a transition point in US history. To be
the person principally responsible for reporting
what is happening in the United States of the first afro-American president
And he's more than just that.There'll be other afro-american presidents of the
United States but I bet you this
there will never be an afro-american president or any other of the United States
who speaks fluent the Bahasa or Indonesian
and I think to you can say
that this is genuinely Barack Obama is genuinely
the first post-cold war president
of the United States. No part of his public life
has been conducted during the Cold War
his studies prior to his arrangement with electoral politics in
the 1990s also had nothing to do with international politics
he was a legal scholar so he
arrived in the position free of
any other paradigms established in his mind that you could expect to see
put there by the Cold War.
It's made him a very interesting person to
to observe and to try to discern
the way in which he's thinking. I always say to my American friends that
we do like you, we love your culture
we enjoy having you around we're grateful for the support we've had since
World War Two
but you are our polar opposites. The average American is
a person who is
optimistic and idealistic. The average Australian
is pessimistic and realistic.
It is a completely different mindset. It produces completely
different attitudes to government. I remember
a couple years ago at the Prayer Breakfast which is held in Washington
every year and is attended by some 3,000 people and invariably the President
attends this function. Now I was sitting next
to the Israeli Ambassador and it was
in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring
and a set of developments occurring that about which the Israelis were not
enthusiastic
and the response to those
those events in the west which was in enthusiastic
a worry for the Israelis anyway
I don't know what it had to do with the Christian religion nothing at all but they had
Mel Gibson up there is braveheart
in this gathering which was supposed to be for prayerful consideration of the need
for nonviolence in the globe
and he was he is there with a a sort of white and blue face
very long shaggy hair. His imitation of a Scottish accent waving a broad sword
and he was making his famous speech
give me freedom or give me death which William Wallace was supposed to have made at some
point
but the inebriated state in which they fought conflict at that point in
time and the notion that he was coherent
is a very very tall historical leap indeed but nevertheless
that is what he said and the Israeli ambassador turned to me ruefully
he said Kim damnit freedom is hardwired in these Americans
which is interesting an interesting perspective because what
he and I guess most of the rest of the world looks at
when we look at international diplomacy we look for
nuance
we look for the possibilities of going around the flanks
to try to get through negotiated solutions
we try not to impose too much of the way in which we think about the world on what
the outcome is likely to be
sufficient alone to get through this challenge with as many people alive as
you can
and in a reasonably prosperous state. That I guess as how
we tend to look at the World a bit in so far as from now small posi
we are able to influence it .That is not the way Americans look at the world at all
They may get back to that point but they sure have a circuitous
route to get there. When something like
what is going on in the Ukraine
is happening something like what's going on in Syria or Egypt
there is an automatic response amongst a large number of
very convicted Americans
we've got to do something about this the world expects us to do something about
this
the world in fact will often tell the Americans that that is exactly what they expect
and when the Americans do something about it find in what ways they can put most
distance between them and the United States
and eat their political capital instead of having to spend some of their own on
getting a solution
well Obama's got news for them:
Obama is the sort a president who thinks that he's not the only president
in political capital spending game
and he expects both within but the United States and without
that when a serious problem has been identified there are going to be other
people
and not just him who are going to work their way through to
a solution there. That leads a lot of criticism of him from time to time
in in the in American congress in particular more broadly
in that enormously brought and diverse American think tank community
scholars o international relations in the United States who are so ubiquitous
You know I think we've got about two or three private think-tanks here
in Australia and there are 384 in Washington alone
its, it does, there's nothing the Americans like more to do than think and speak and
they've got plenty of opportunities for themselves
to organise all of this. Obama understands that he is
inheriting a world that is very different from that of any of his
predecessors and he's not sure what that means
and he he approached it in the first instance in that spirit of optimism that
is
a national characteristic and not just simply his own
And one can't help feel that he's been deeply disappointed.
That when he's gone out there offered an open hand to Iranians
offered an open hand to the broader political Islamic community
offered good officers and hope to
to people worried about the Israeli
Palestinian discord and its continuing capacity to
destabilize global politics, offer
opportunity for friendly
diplomacy with China, with the countries of the area
it must be
saddening to him that much of what he does
much of what he's done tends to be spurned
nuanced undermined criticized its a
For a fellow of ...a cerebral character
an essentially optimistic personality this must have been
for him quite a harsh
harsh learning experience but he's responding to it
and there is structure emerging now
in American foreign policy and I'll talk little bit about that
a bit later on now I've got to go on according to the lecture topic to the
Australian side
I was taken by surprise when I became foreign minister not
foreign minister. I would have been even more surprised at that but
and Steve would have been very surprised but the
but when I became Ambassador I had in my mind
an experience particularly during the Cold War and being a minister for defence
and a long-standing student of the United States
and I thought I was pretty current. I was not current
at all. Not at all. We were
intensely engaged with the US back in the days when I was
defence minister very importantly and substantially engaged across-the-board
in intelligence and defence terms but I had no idea
how deeper the relation had become during the course
of the 1990s. How more deeply imbedded
we were both technologically and in personell terms in the United States
intelligence system
It's not just the US's intelligence system more broadly
but how important our contribution was
in all of that. How deeply imbedded we were in the United States for
armed forces including the command arrangements. I think the deputy commander
for example
of the main army units said army units now in the
operating of PACOM in Hawaii deputy commander is an Australian General
and there's a lot of equivalent positions dotted through
both PACOM and
and on or two others of the
the American command arrangements.
Australian and American militaries are far more intertwined now
Australian and American intelligence services far more
intertwined now than was the case
when I was defence minister in the 1980s
That's the first surprise. The second surprise I've got
was I was not in any way shape or form used to thinking about
the relationship with the United States in an economic context
like all Australians we we've sort of been
self propagandised on the trade statistics
and we look to the extraordinary good training opportunities with established
with East Asia China in particular Korea Japan
a burgeoning trade in Indonesia
that is a focus but
a one-dimensional focus for us but it's the one that we're traditionally used to
Traded goods that's how you think about the international economy
It's important but not that important
trade is conducted where somebody feels a need and he's obtaining what he needs
at a price that he's prepared to pay. When he no longer needs the product
or he can no longer afford it trade does not take place simple as that
Investment is forever. Well not strictly forever
If you're betting on someone you're not just selling him a widget
you're investing in him and when we take a look now
the investment figures an extraordinary picture is emerging
and that is of the integration of the Australian
and American economies. United States invests directly and indirectly in a
in Australia
630 billion dollars which is ten times what it invests in China.
We invest directly and indirectly in the United States
430 billion dollars which is 20 times
what we invest in China
and if that's not enough of a statistic to conjure with try another one
we have when I first went to the US four years ago I used to say proudly
we have the fourth largest sum under management in the globe
that's called punching above your weight. We don't have the fourth largest economy
we have the fourth largest sum of money under management
in the globe. I now say courtesy of the foreign ministers last speech
in the United States we have the third largest sum
of money under management in the globe 1.9 trillion dollars
another 12 years that will be close to about five or six trillion dollars
as we move up the the pecking order
Where is that money going to be? Well let me tell you
it's going to be in the US and we're going to be more intertwined with the
United States
than we are now. Australian capitalism when it bets overseas bets where it's
secure and where it can be
suitably turned into
a reliable set of earnings and
that is the United States. The interesting thing over the last three
years
despite the statistics you see associated with ConocoPhillips and
Chevron's
multi-billion dollar investments in the north of Western Australia
and over in over in Queensland despite that
entering the stats that I've been talking about over the last three years
for the last three years the amount of new investment in the United States
from Australia compared with new investment in Australia
from the United States the Australian to US figure has exceeded
in new investment the money coming into Australia
now some 10,000 Australian businesses
operate in the United States some of them are very big
for example Lend-Lease which I think the Americans think I was an American
company given its title
but is in fact the Australian and does all the defence housing in the United States
that's not a small amount of activity
BHP Billiton is the third-biggest driller in the
in the Mexican Gulf I when I went down there to see the
chap who is the is the general the
CEO of BHP
energy which is not headquartered in Australia it's headquartered in Houston
in Texas it was during the period of time of that BP oil spill which you'll
probably remember
and I asked him how he was going and he said well I spend a lot of my time
telling folks there is an H between the B and the P
and the
and then you've got the Lowey's
Westfields the second-biggest shopping centre on
in the United States you've got
the Macquarie Bank the largest participant
in public-private partnerships in the United States
Bowral the biggest US brick producer
well that that's those are the sort of standard-bearer
outfits that you think about but the most important elements of them
are in fact not those big infrastructure operations
but really high-tech
high-tech Biosciences
high-tech electronics fiber optics
nanotechnologies and there's a reason for that and it's this
that the United States generates
nearly eighty percent of global venture capital
and if you want to get your product going
and you've invented something brilliant or you've acquired from CSIRO
a patent over one of their many inventions what do you do?
What you do is get yourself to the US
get up at least an outlet there because that is going to give you
a competitive a globally competitive market base
or you actual shift the operation over there.
and Australians have loads a great ideas another area where we punch above our weight.
The number 15 or 13 should always feature
as punching above weight stats because we're the 13th largest economy in the
world so anything
where we we sort of fall out of 18 or 19 we're punching below our weight when we
turn up
above 13 we're punching above it.
the United... China is the biggest trading partner
or second-biggest of 120 countries on earth.
United States is the biggest research partner of every country on earth.
So the US France collaboration on
research exceeds the French or the Germans or
or anybody else and so on you can work your way around the globe on that.
In our case we are the 8th biggest research partner
with the United States. We're punching above their weight by a factor of about 2
when it comes to that
there's an awful lot of compliant around the globe over the
a the theft of intellectual property and
a finger pointed at the cyber espionage in
China, Russia, Iran and a number of other places
Its a worry. It's the thing that really has the focus
of the American electorate. It troubles them.
but I think there's a statistic that I'm aware of that ought to be more
troubling
the Chinese and that one to them and that is this
of the kids who come to the US not to do engineering degrees or business degrees
or whatever they do go home.
The kids who come to the US to do a PhD
in the research sciences
ninety percent of the students from
India and from China
five years after graduation are still in the United States
and why is that important? That's when they marry and when they marry what decision
do they take?
The decision they take is to stay in the United States
so basically that
Statue of Liberty up they could have an extra couple of slogans added to it
send me your really brilliant people
and we will accommodate them forever
the United States is going through a manufacturing renaissance. It'snot a job
producing renaissance of much description because it's based on
technologies which effectively require few but highly skilled people
but what it generates in the service industries around is enormous
the American American capitalism is going through the process of
reinventing itself and that reinvention process will be largely complete complete
within the next five to 10 years accidents, global conflicts and other
things
perhaps get in the way hopefully not probably not
but short of that the United States will surge again.
The picture of transnational capitalism is changing too.
1970s phenomena is what created
the the transnational enterprises of such ill fame and domestic debate
in in wealthy countries like ours and of such
worry in a lot of the countries in which they find themselves
find them operating well its it's a thing of the past
this is going to change substantially over the
course of the next 10 years because one thing new technology industries
have discovered is whereas previously all you needed was the laboratory at home
and production could take place a thousand couple thousand miles away
product now changes so fast that the production engineers and the labs have
to be close together
so guess what capitalism's going home.
that's the these things are only anecdotal
but these are the changes that are being made and who is at the epicentre of all
of this?
Well it's the United States
and so we now find ourselves
courtesy of the superannuation arrangements that we put in place in the
nineteen eighties
courtesy of the free trade agreement that we signed with the united states
8 or 9 years ago which is now operational
and its most important parts where in the facilitation of
investment between the two countries courtesy of that
we are becoming with the United States in many ways a singular economy.
That is the dominant feature of Australia's global
economic presentation.
and conjures up completely different views
completely different assessments from that which you normally see
in Australian political debate. Not that our connections with
Asia aren't useful. One of the reasons why the American are so
fascinated with us now is the connection that we have with Asia
and when they give to Americans these sorts of stats
second-biggest language after English spoken in the Australian household
is Mandarin and if you take a look at the new
immigrants to Australia the biggest language coming in
apart from English is Hindi
there's an understanding that if you are going to reach out
with your product into the region there might be a bit of expertise there in
Australia
that you ought to tap in to. We are looking so much more important to the US
an that leads me to a third thing I want to talk about in this
change in character of the relationship
so different from what it was when I was
the Minister for Defence back in the eighties
and that is the significance of the region in which we inhabit
I once had this appalling knock down drag out fight with Cap Weinberger
I was about to produce the 1987 Defence White Paper.
In it I was arguing that Australian Defence planning forward
would be structured around a concept of self-reliance
that we would wish to be able militarily dominate our approaches
and that was the most important thing that we should do,
our force structure - the kit that we oughta buy oughta be directly related to that.
Weinberger's response was, listen we're trying to operate a global
a global deterrent system here,
we're not actually looking for allies who will wander of trying to work out
how to defend themselves
We want a contribution. And we had a long discussion
about how an effective Australia would help the Western Alliance
But at the end of the day he said look you fellas just go and do what you please
so long as you keep those joint facilities going and so long as you keep
that technical collaboration you have with us
nothing else matters all that much. It was really interesting
why and it's suddenly struck me like a silver bullet: they're gonna let us get away with
anything
We can get over there, we can advocate chemical weapons controls we can
advocate South Pacific nuclear-free zones
we can set up the ideas of APEC, we can do
a completely different approach to dealing with problems in Cambodia, the
Americans.
And at the end of the day even though we annoy them
they don't care, provided
we do the things that sustain
our end of the central balance between the Soviet Union and the United States,
that's what matters. Why should this
liberal view apply to Australia? Well
Southeast Asia didn't matter. After the Nixon Doctrine, the
United States rationalised the future planning
of their own force structure around the flashpoints to the Cold War - North Asia,
Europe, maybe the Middle East.
Everything else, Nixon said, our friends and allies in those areas - and they're good
friends and allies - ought to look in the first instance to their own defence.
So Weinberger said, well you're just doing what Nixon Doctrine said anyway so
why should I fuss. That was then
now we have been transformed
we haven't left the geography that we had before
but whereas we were the Cold-War backwater
now we are the southern tier of the focal point of global politics
courtesy of the changes in the global economy
Asia-Pacific is the centre and we are
co-located on its southern tier
with a reach on the basis of daily discourse
into the main time zones
of the focal point
of global politics. So from being
essentially a backwater we are now crucial
The Americans are treating that as crucial
So when President Obama started talking about
a pivot - subsequently changed in language to 'rebalance' -
he was dealing-in Australia
to the heart of American politics.
Much my time over the last four years - and I can see
as usual I'm beginning to go over time - much of my time over the last few years has been
us advocating one set of perspectives on that
to the United States, falling on fallow ground while we do,
nuanced in many important ways from precisely the way they see things
but nevertheless on the same page when it comes to a discussion of where the US wants
to be.
Where Obama and Clinton made those statements about
a few years ago about doing this it set
so many hares running through Europe and the Middle East
who were being used to being the focal point of American attention really since
World War Two
Enormous anxiety, enormous
'quizzicalness', if you like, about what all that is.
Generally speaking the sorts of things that Obama and the Americans have been
talking about
completely misunderstood by them. He wasn't saying that they were irrelevant
he was just saying that if you have to have a focal point it's going to be this.
That's not gonna say that you're going to ignore other things but it does have an impact
because there are a whole variety of factors involved
in the United States recognising that there are limits on their power
and one of the factors that emerges from that is a determination by the Americans -
when people have good ideas for things they might
do, the Americans are going to come back and have
very good ideas for what you might do if you want to pursue the same
objectives. Clinton as Secretary of State built
some magnificent building blocks, put them in place in the character
of relations with American relations bilateral relations with other countries
in the region around us. The blocks have been put in place; Kerry is now
the Secretary of State of course, and he is often
blamed or [it is] argued that he's not focusing on the main game,
being the Asia-Pacific. That's quite wrong. He is.
He's been to the the region, he's talked within the region
for a number of visits
exactly the same as the number that had been put in place by Hillary Clinton.
But he's dealing with other problems and the rhetoric is around those problems.
If I have one complaint in terms of the presentation of American foreign policy
at the moment
my complaint is that they are not
yet finding a way
to mix the messages about what they're up to in the Middle East
with what they're up to in Asia. I've gone into the State Department so many times
at so many different levels to
try and very helpfully put this point of view
forward. And what they're doing is
a want to get a situation where nonproliferation
objective is achieved in regard to the Iranians; they want a situation when they can
sensibly exit
Afghanistan; they want a
position in place where somehow or other,
some form of agreement is is achieved in Syria
and so on. They want a lot of things
but they're also very determined that the folk there
will play a role, but the role that they are playing
is a role which is interesting to the rest to the globe
but absolutely critical in Asia, And this is what I say to them: Don't say that when
you're
in an endless diplomatic shuffle
with Abu Mazen and with
Netanyahu, don't say that that is simply about
trying to resolve that Palestinian issue or that you're simply about
trying to get an outcome in Iran that
is important on a nonproliferation objective. Understand this -
Asia is deeply bound up in your success in the Middle East.
Only you can play those sorts of roles in the Middle East and what does that
mean in Asia?
Well what it means in Asia can be looked at at two different levels - cultural and
economic
Islam is not
dominated by the Middle East
Islam is fundamentally in population terms
an Asian phenomenon. You can fit the entire Arab world in
population terms into Indonesia and have leftovers
and that's before you look at Pakistan and before you look at India
and before you look at Bangladesh
and you have the world's most prominent Islamic democracy
in Malaysia. Islam
is an Asian phenomenon and they are concerned about what happens in the Middle
East
Kurt Campbell used to from time to time ask me a question and I always knew that
he was asking the question because he knew the answer
and he's testing whether I was properly catechised
But on one occasion
he did ask me a question he didn't know the answer to. He said Kim,
when your foreign ministers go through Southeast Asia do they ask you
questions about Palestine?
And I said, well no they don't. He said, y'know it's the first thing
they raise with me as I go through the region;
their opening discussion is always
about Palestine. I said well they know darn well we can't do much about it but I
think you might be able to.
But what was important to them was that those issues were resonating
in the minds of Islamic people in the
in the region and their hopes wer,e because they've genuine affection for
the United States,
the US could do something about it. The second thing,
economic: seventy percent
of the customers of [the] Middle East are in the Asia-Pacific;
[in] ten years time that'll be ninety and if the projections for what's happening
in global oil and gas production elsewhere, probably
in another 15-20 years time
Asia will be the only customer
of the Middle East. And he who keeps - they who keep -
the sea lanes of communication open
between the Persian Gulf and through Asia up to
North Asia, they're the ones who keep
Asia alive. Those sea lanes
are utterly critical for Asian prosperity.
There is only one power capable of doing that
and there will only ever be one power capable of doing that, and if that power
doesn't do it then it won't be done.
And this is a matter of vast importance to the people in the
Asia-Pacific region, and so it is
important that Secretary Kerry, who does care about the affairs in the region at the
same time as he has these enormous other burdens
actually develops a linkage in the narrative
that is American foreign policy to put those two things together
Now I have about 50 other things I'd like to say but I see that
I'm going to really knock question time about quite badly if I do
so I'm just gonna finish off, just go back over it a little bit
the ground that I've been going over to this point and just
say just a few a few salient things about it
We are valued as an intelligent muse
by the United States. That used to be, and it sometimes still is, is a conceit
that, for example, in terms of relationships with China
that we could somehow or other stand between them and sorta munificently
bring them together.
That's absurd; it's a silly proposition; the Americans know a lot more about China
than we do.
They relate to the Chinese across-the-board far more closely than
our people do. They have serious discussions with the Chinese about investment policy in
industrial issues and the like - we don't; we sell them
minerals and energy. The Americans try to establish
companies in China and struggle in a very difficult
regulatory environment. There are a lot of things to say to the Chinese and they
know them extremely well.
And the Chinese don't need mediation to talk to the Americans, but I'll tell what
Americans do need -
they need somebody knows something about it to talk to
and the Americans value us enormously as a muse
in that area; that is an important element of it.
The second thing that is important to it is the integration of our armed
services with theirs.
We have a very high level of scientific collaboration
very few armed forces now globally can keep up with the United States
we are at least within fingertip touch with them.
Most of that is because we're prepared to pay
good cold hard cash for the equipment we receive, and we make sure the
equipment we receive has absolutely all the bits and pieces on it
that we need, not just some of them and
that's a very important
attribute as well. But we also add value;
we invent things and many of the things that we invent
end up on American warships or in American warplanes.
We are a very creative people when it comes to
scientific excellence. The principal
passive defence system now of American
warships, and Australian for that matter, is a rocket called Nulka;
it's a hovering rocket that replicates the...
as it's fired out it replicates the radar signature of the ship
and therefore - but does it so strongly so the incoming guided missile goes chasing
after the rocket
rather than chasing after the warship which fired it.
An Australian invention. We have
a very advanced radar now - [an] Australian invention
the Americans are beginning to pick up, and there's a whole range of highly
classified programs
which I am often indiscrete about but not on television cameras and
in front of an audience like this one.
But we are a very useful partner for the United States
on that front. We are useful to the United States economically and getting
more so
in the manner in which I've been talking about, and the Americans are beginning to realise
that.
I got so chuffed when last... Americans are
not used to arguing that people ought to invest in the US;
the US should be investing in other people, that's what they say, but things have changed.
The economic power equation has changed [and the] US now runs
investment encouragement, and I was enormously proud
when a speech that Obama made encouraging people to invest in the
United States,
he mentioned only four countries in the course of that speech, one of them was Australia.
The stats are starting to show up in the minds of the president's
speechwriters, and when you're a statistic
in the mind of a presidential speechwriter you're an exceptionally powerful animal indeed.
[laughter]
So thanks very much for coming along and I think I've got about 20 minutes for
questions. [Applause]
[MC] Thank you, the very definition of a tour de force. We have two microphones on both
sides
I just ask that you keep your question short so we can get as
many as possible in
[Beazley] What he means by that is keep my answer short. [MC] Indeed. Go ahead...
Yes over here first. Hi ambassador, my name's Angus Duncan and I'm
a student here at UWA.
Certainly you've talked up the US-Australia relationship
but amongst young people there's there's this
growing negative perception of America flowing especially from
the consequences of Iraq, Afghanistan,
the GFC and partly because of Obama's
failure to achieve his legislative goals.
Do you think there's any sort of
merits to this thinking among young people or are we just a bit
ignorant of the realities of the relationship? No,
our young people very intelligent but I gotta tell you the grizzles
you might have about the Americans now are nothing compared with the generation I
was a member of in relation to that. I mean, everybody thinks they've
they've invented things anew this is a very quiet very affectionately
oriented
far as the United States call is concerned, young people's gathering.
The young people of my generation were spitting mad
and that could not be said
to describe the situation now.
We have a massive interest
in the US; you know I always I love doing this particular status to
the Pew Research group
did it in the not 2008 presidential election. They globally asked a question:
are you interested in the US presidential elections? In the United
States they answered that question eighty-three percent said they were;
they asked the question in Australia and eighty-four percent said they were.
We do know a lot about the United States and that is because we absorb American
political culture, social
culture in Phillip Adams' rueful
expression "like blotters", and
far more than was the case when I was a bit younger than you
where the orientation was enormously Anglo.
Now, our accents, our
social interests, our cultural interests
are so heavily American it just does not bear
comparison. We may object to that but there is that close
view. We are so close now we believe we have the right
in detail to micromanage American policy and a right to be
critical of things that they doing.
But I have to say this, I've never heard a criticism by a young person or an old person
of things that are going on in the United States from this country
or from Europe or from the Middle East that I don't hear day in, day out in the
United States.
The United States is heavily politically disaggregated;
the United States has never been so
ideologically divided. The Democratic
caucus of the House of Representatives
is to the left of the Australian Labor Party federal caucus.
The Republican caucus of the House of Representatives
is to the right of the Australian Liberal Party.
And you can see it in
crossover voting. In 1982 of the 430-odd members of the House of Representatives
347 of those members
had a substantial record of collaboration with members of another
political party
in putting forward a piece of legislation or supporting
a piece of legislation in the House of Representatives.
Last year that figure was 11 and
of that 11, nine were Democrats and two were Republicans.
There is a drift
to the right substantially; there are no moderates left
in the Republican Party; there's conservatives versus radicals.
Difference in the radical component
is whereas the successive
manifestations of the right in Republican politics since the 1960s
has being a more
internationalist hue, the last being neo-cons during the course of the
Iraq war. Now increasingly it's isolationist.
So they say there's
an intense debate in the US on all the things
that you've been talking about here but it's also a factor - and this is something
that
really requires a bit of attention -
the United States... this is a very circumspect
administration, it's a very cautious
administration. If you're looking at the past of
American... the ideological gamut of
American foreign policy you take
the approaches
to limitations on American
power, limitations on the
full panoply of intelligence collection or what oughta happen in regard to it,
the way in which the Middle East should be engaged
You take a look at all of that and essentially the administration is
within a sort of centrist to centre-left tradition
of American foreign policy. Oddly enough the exception to this
- and because I want to be short I'll just simply make the assertion -
is the pivot, is in the
far east, east Asia. There the United States is operating
classic older alliance-building mechanisms;
development of international legal principles
assertion of the right character of relationships between states
that he is redolent of the way in which
the policies operated more
in the nineteen fifties sixties and seventies, and
it's an interesting phenomenon which I'm trying to think my way
through the consequences of that now but
a lot of people in other contexts say that the Asia-Pacific
region manifests is the last manifestation of the treaty of Westphalia;
that this is the last place where state sovereignty
is the be-all and end-all. But I don't want to listen to
talks about the, you know, the cross-border character of
global politics now. They don't think like that at all
in the Asia-Pacific region; and the US is responding accordingly.
So there's much about American-East Asian diplomacy which is simply
classical and conservative with a small 'c'
but also very forward leaning, and it's no accident that the bulk of American armed forces
are going to be shifted in that direction
So you're seeing a very different picture emerging now, a very bifurcated picture
but because there is so much up for grabs here - and the old paradigm of the Cold War is
gone
every time you see an American administration change
from this point on you're likely to see quite substantial changes in foreign
policy.
[MC] Yes right here
David Denemark from Political Science UWA. Welcome back Kim
Yeah, nice to see an old colleague!
You said that Obama was the first post-cold war president
and one of the things that's changed is the end of the bifurcation
of the single enemy and state-based threat
One of the implications is the rise of reliance on intelligence-gathering
which has its own politics as we've found here
Australia linked in with the US and information gathering in places like
Indonesia
I was wondering whether you might say something about the politics of information-gathering
and perhaps fuelling some of the discontent and the unease that
was mentioned before? Not a whole helluva lot, David.
Look I think the
there is a - and I don't want to be drawn into this because
the government that employs me and directs me
studiously avoids discussion of
those sorts of issues. But I can talk about it in terms of
generality. The overwhelming
focus of Australian
and friends' intelligence-gathering is on the security
of the folk at home. That's the overwhelming focus of it, y'know arguments
with bits and pieces of that
but it's not about trying to find out what business is doing what and how we might
advantage one mate there; it's not
it's not about knowing the personal lives
of a person whom the analyst or the
the collector at that point in time who might choose to switch his
intervention on to and the material that's coming forward.
We are far less ubiquitous
intelligence gatherers than other countries
on the globe. But that's not you
and admittedly the KGB had
responsibility for border guards back in the Cold War but when we exited the Cold
War
I think the CIA and ancillary intelligence
agencies in the United States I think they employed about 70,000 people
KGB numbers, albeit with the border guards as well, was 1 million
and [finds right words]
because we're a conscience-driven people because that's an important thing to be
because when people who debate seriously through the terms and conditions of
our security
and whether or not we are stepping the mark or overstepping the mark
and what checks and balances should be placed on us
I'm afraid to tell ya that we are
just about the only intelligence community conducting that discussion
and those who are far more ubiquitous in their purposes
than we are, and just as capable, have no such discussion
at all. [MC] Maybe one last question right here in the centre
Thanks for being here today Mr Beazley
Given the recent failures of the US regulatory system that triggered the
GFC
are still present, in your opinion is Australia
adequately prepared for a possible future financial crisis
arising in the United States? Well,
hopefully the US has learned from the GFC.
Whatever the character of the current regulatory arrangements - and there's a lot of
complaint about that in
the US from the conservative side, saying it's too tight and
is impacting excessively on investment.
Hopefully you learn
new lessons from every past set of mistakes and that those lessons are being learned.
And certainly when you look at the way in which the American central banking
system operates now
they are very very cautious about those things.
It's a... but it's a very big operation, things can go wrong. I remember
when I used to be finance minister,
I use to be responsible, as finance minister, for deregulation
in Australia, and one of the things which looked
a bit ultra vires the overall policy was our banking policy
because we had this four pillars policy
which forbade the four major Australian banks
effectively buying each other, and I remember going to Keating
and saying, look, you know this is a bit
at variance with what you say your policies are; you think, you
you keep arguing you want Australia to go global, you keep saying that you want to
have institutions which are heavily engaged
with the global system overall,
why don't you abandon this position?
And Keating's response to me was, Now listen, mate,
if we allow these people to amalgamate
they'll be more powerful than us.
Now the consequence of
his adopting that position was this: before the global financial crisis
Australia had no banks
in the top 100 globally; we now have four in the top 20.
We are a powerful influence in global finance
and we deserve to be because we
are very good at protecting ourselves
and we take things, the regulatory environment, very seriously; that doesn't
obviate mistakes - there are always going to be
mistakes in this process; or lastly
it doesn't obviate that either
But we have a different... There are many differences between us and Americans
Americans have immense hopes for
a well-informed massively motivated individual free of fetters
to get out there and drive a global economy.
We have a different approach and that is
anybody who's out there like that is somebody to be watched
and when necessarily surrounded
and our approach is right
[titters of laughter]
Others could learn from it
but one of the things I am not permitted to do as ambassador
is to proselytise outside the most immediate
of Australia's interest in
in discussion with the United States, but it doesn't stop you doing a bit of boasting
and we... there is a lot about us
in recent years that you can boast about, and a lot that the United States polity
has got to learn
from our experience, and the interesting thing is
we are one of the few places on earth they're prepared to hear it from.
[MC] Please join me in thanking the ambassador [Applause]