Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too thank the member for Bruce for moving this very worthy motion. The 50th anniversary of the Bangkok Declaration and the establishment of ASEAN is truly an event that deserves the recognition of the Australian parliament. ASEAN has been one of the world's most successful multilateral organisations over this period. Tasked with promoting regional peace and stability between the nations of South-East Asia, the results speak for themselves. In one of the most religiously diverse regions in the world, which is home to millions of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus living side by side, confronting legacies of conflicts from colonialism to the fallout of the Second World War and as a scene for geostrategic jostling by great powers, South-East Asia has faced significant challenges over the last 50 years. Yet, through it all, ASEAN has been extraordinarily successful at delivering peace and stability throughout the region.

This stability has enabled extraordinary economic growth in a region that today has a collective population of around 620 million people and a GDP of around US$2.5 trillion—a region that, when considered collectively, justifies being contemplated on the same plane as China and India as a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific. Indeed ASEAN is a regional grouping that should have a far larger place in the Australian political imagination. ASEAN is central to Australia's economic, strategic and foreign policy aspirations. Considered collectively, ASEAN is Australia's second or third largest trading partner, with current two-way trade surpassing $100 billion annually since 2014, which is more than our trade with Japan, the EU or the US.

Moreover, as a collection of smaller nations in a region of rapidly changing geostrategic interests, we have many strategic and foreign policy interests in common. Like the member states of ASEAN, as a mid-sized trading nation, Australia has a strong interest in the maintenance of a rules based international system. As a neighbour in South-East Asia, Australia has a shared interest in the maintenance of a multilateral, rules based approach to issues in our own backyard, which are as varied as maritime cooperation, public health, human trafficking, transnational crime and terrorism. To this end, Australia would do well to work harder to buttress the work of ASEAN in these areas and, in enmeshing our own international efforts with those of our ASEAN nations, consult and cooperate with our partners in ASEAN.

As other speakers have discussed in this debate, aspiring to membership of ASEAN has been advocated by some in Australia, including former Prime Minister Paul Keating. Even absent this explicit ambition, my view is that engagement with ASEAN and ASEAN nations ought to be the highest priority of Australian foreign policy. Not only does Australia share many common interests with our ASEAN neighbours; we're also more likely to be able to shape the views and actions of great nations outside South-East Asia, if we are seen as an effective and expert partner within our own region. While it is true that Australia was ASEAN's first dialogue partner and that we have since established an ASEAN-Australia Strategic Partnership, all too often we have failed to sufficiently focus our efforts and resources in a way that we need to in order to be an effective and expert partner to our neighbours in South-East Asia.

Despite decades of discussion about the important of ASEAN, we still do not show enough interest as a nation in learning about our region. While over 123,000 South-East Asians are currently studying in Australia, the number of Australians studying in South-East Asia is a tiny fraction of this number. Depressingly, it is well-chronicled that the number of Australians studying South-East Asian languages like Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog and Vietnamese is vanishingly small and shrinking by the year. So, too, are we failing to invest in the next generation of academic experts in the culture, history and politics of South-East Asia that we need to inform our engagement in the region.

Other nations outside ASEAN with similar interests to Australia, like South Korea, are making a much better fist of doing what is necessary to marshal national resources towards engaging with ASEAN. Given this, this motion's call to encourage the government to place the highest priority on the 2018 ASEAN-Australia Special Summit, to reaffirm and strengthen Australia's strategic partnership with ASEAN and to identify practical actions for Australia to deepen its collaboration in support of ASEAN's future success is crucial.

Australia's geo-strategic environment and our place in the global economy are changing rapidly. The great Australian complacency that we have all too often fallen into in the past will not suffice in the more challenging international context that confronts us in the future. To this end, we could all learn a thing or two from the success that ASEAN has had in shaping the international environment of its nation states over the past 50 years. It's a lesson to the rest of the world in what determined, sustained and creative foreign policy can achieve over the long term.

See this speech in context