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Speech

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer

Canberra, 1 December 1999

Australia at Year's End - Retrospect and Prospect - Questions and Answers

Alexander Downer MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs at the National Press Club

(Check Against Delivery)

See Mr Downer's Speech - Australia at Year's End - Retrospect and Prospect

CHAIR:
Thank you very much Minister.

As usual we pass on to our period of questions and the first one today is from Amanda Buckley.

QUESTION:
Amanda Buckley, Bloomberg News, Mr Downer. I know you'd be disappointed not to get a question about the WTO demonstrations that are keeping us all riveted to the TV sets today. At the weekend I saw Alan Oxley the former GATT Ambassador saying that many Federal Ministers were frightened of using the word 'free trade' in their speeches at present because it seems to be coded for many people for globalisation, job losses, and other things that they don't like. The sort of backlash that we saw with Jeff Kennett down in Victoria.

I guess the question for you as Foreign Minister is how do you go about building domestic support for free trade? How do you better sell these policies and how seriously do you take this sort of backlash that we see going on in Seattle today and certainly here in Australia as well?

ALEXANDER DOWNER:
Well I take it not so much in Seattle but more broadly speaking around the international community reasonably seriously. I think I'm right in saying, I might not be entirely right, but I think I'm right in saying the last time I made a speech here at the Press Club was a speech in support of globalisation, and not surprisingly I am a very strong supporter of the liberal market approach and trade liberalisation. Yes, I'll say it - free trade. I've always been a supporter of free trade.

I read Alan Oxley's article and well I just don't agree with the point. I mean I think what we have to do is continue to argue our case. I've never thought, by the way, in all the time I've supported free trade and that's ever since I was a student, I've never thought that it was an easy case to sell because the benefits are spread widely and where there are losers they're usually rather heavily concentrated. The closure of a factory makes a front page story. The opening of the addition of 10, you know, jobs per factory somewhere else in another part of the state or the community it doesn't really make a story at all.

But what can we say about trade liberalisation and the liberal market model? We can say that no country that has tried it has ended up poor as a result. We can say that those countries that have tried to close themselves off from the rest of the world have all suffered in doing so. We can say that changes in technology are completely irreversible. They are irreversible, and what we've got to do is make those technological changes work for us, and make globalisation work for us, not become - I was going to say twentieth - twenty-first century luddites.

Those people who are demonstrating in Seattle are basically the 1999 equivalent of the Luddite movement in England. They want to stop history in its tracks, they don't want to see any progress. They blame all of the problems of the world on trade liberalisation. I don't think many people would believe the arguments that they were particularly putting to their advantage to the advantage of the various groups that they represent, that they went out and tried to make sure that society took advantage of globalisation rather than try to resist the inevitable.

The Luddites failed because what they were proposing was absurd. Equally, these people are trying to defy technology and you can't do it.

CHAIR:
The next question is from Catherine McGrath.

QUESTION:
Mr Downer, Catherine McGrath, ABC Television.

There are reports that John Howard is planning a trip to the UK next year to coincide with the Centenary of Federation. Can you tell me how advanced plans are? Are you involved? Will you be going, and how much will it cost?

DOWNER:
I can't tell you how much anything will cost of that nature. So the last part of the question is I don't know. I have to be a little careful here not to announce the travel plans of the Prime Minister or other Ministers or even myself prematurely. What I can say is that during the course of next year in either June or July, and Alex Allen will remember exactly which month it is - I think it's July - there is going to be an Australia Week in Britain in order to commemorate the passage of our Constitution Bill through the British House of Commons, through the British Parliament. It will be hundred years since that happened, as distinct from a hundred years since the day Federation actually came into effect at the beginning of January 2001.

So that is what the celebration next year is for, and I think it would be indiscreet of me to start prematurely making all sorts of announcements about what's going to happen. But it's going to be a pretty big event. There are a range of different functions that have been organised for that week, and I think I could probably go so far as telling you that inter alia I shall be participating.

CHAIR:
Ian McPhedran.

QUESTION:
Mr Downer, Ian McPhedran from News Limited. Firstly, thanks for the Christmas Card. [Laughter]

Given the ...

DOWNER:
The nice family touch I thought.

McPHEDRAN:
It was very good.

Given the level of dissent developing amongst the young people in East Timor, which I'm sure you would have seen in some DIO reporting. Do you believe that Xanana Gusmao and his comrades are up to the tasks of rebuilding that place, and, secondly, I heard one of your senior colleagues the other day, and perhaps future opponents, characterise your leadership skills as a bit of a joke, and I'd like to ask you do you have any ambitions to one day again lead the Liberal Party?

DOWNER:
Well, honestly, I didn't enjoy the experience very much last time. Well actually to be honest with you, I did to start with, but I think I ranged from having the highest approval rating - some swine will dig this out, I may as well do it myself - from having the highest approval rating of any political leader in Australia's history to something akin to the lowest approval rating of any leader in Australian political history, so I'm not sure what my wife would think if I came home one day and said guess what, I want to do it all again.

But DIO - DIO is an analytical organisation by the way, it's not an intelligence collection agency, so just for those people who, not necessarily you by the way, but those people who seem to think that it has another function, it doesn't.

Do I think Xanana Gusmao and his team are up to the task? I basically do. I mean I think - I've said this on a number of occasions when I first met Xanana Gusmao which was in a Jakarta prison at the end of January or early February of this year - it was in February I think. I was very impressed with him, and I did think he had that sort of Mandela quality of not just courage but he had that quality of forgiveness and I don't think if you're giving birth to a new nation which has been a fairly violent birth, and that was pretty much the case with South Africa as well, you aren't going to get very far unless you have that sense of forgiveness. You might not forget, and you surely wouldn't, but that sense of forgiveness.

I was, for example, very impressed with the reports I heard today in the media of the meeting between President Wahid and Xanana Gusmao.

It seems to me that for East Timor it's absolutely fundamentally important that East Timor builds a constructive relationship with Indonesia. That can only be done if there are at least is some sense of forgiveness and they don't forget, they certainly should be able to forgive, and the pragmatic view of how to take East Timor forward is absolutely vital.

I think Xanana Gusmao, and for that matter President Wahid have both shown that through their meeting, and I think in the way Xanana Gusmao generally speaking has been dealing with the difficult domestic issues that he has to deal with so far he's been doing that impressively. So it's early days for him, but I place a lot of hope in Xanana Gusmao. I have a - you've probably gathered this over the last year - I have a very positive view of him. I have mixed views about all sorts of people, but I do have a very positive view about him.

CHAIR:
The next question is from Jane Nelson.

QUESTION:
Jane Nelson from Reuters, Mr Downer.

Given the challenges you've faced over the last two years in terms of the East Timor crisis, and the Asian financial crisis, is our next big challenge rebuilding relations with Indonesia, and in that context are your plans firming for a trip to Jakarta to visit President Wahid?

The second question. Given the record of visits between the two countries, would it be more appropriate for President Wahid to actually come to Australia?

DOWNER:
Well, I made the point in my speech which I regard as an important point, and that is that our relationship with Indonesia must be a balanced one built on mutual respect.

A great challenge for me to rebuild relations with Indonesia. I would say it's important for Australia to have a constructive relationship with Indonesia, but it's important for Indonesia to have a constructive relationship with Australia. It's not a one-way process, it's a two-way process. In so far as it's important for us to rebuild relations with Indonesia, it's important for them to rebuild relations with Australia.

Both sides are pragmatic enough to recognise the importance of doing that and we will do it in a cautious progressive sort of way.

I think at the business level the relationship seems to me to be working pretty well. At, if you like, the sort of broader community level, the contacts are being maintained. Our Ambassador in Jakarta has had very good access to the new government from the President downwards and the Indonesian Ambassador has now arrived here and we've given him a - I think you would agree - a warm welcome, so things are gradually moving forward, and at some stage I will go to Jakarta and then we'll see about visits by heads of government. That's just something that hasn't been contemplated in any very significant way at this stage.

I think everyone in Australia would more or less agree with this, that we need to take the relationship forward but we need to do it cautiously step by step.

There are still East Timor issues that remain to be resolved. There's still the need for the refugees who want to return to East Timor who are in West Timor to be able to return. There are over a 100,000 - I think the UN's estimate is about 107,000, 108,000 as of yesterday have returned, but there are still somewhere between a 100 and 130,000 left to return. We want to see them return.

We want the whole of the East Timor issue bedded down and I've said before, people argue with me about this, but anyway I think they're wrong. I've said before, once there is integrity in our relationship over the issue of East Timor and we are really getting to that point now, then our bilateral relationship is going to be a great deal easier to manage in the years ahead.

Foreign Ministers won't ever, you know, in the future, come here to the National Press Club and be asked to, you know, explain difficult issues in relation to East Timor which might be cutting across the bilateral relationship with Indonesia and make that sort of invidious judgement that Australian Foreign Ministers over the last quarter of a century have had to make about well what can I say about East Timor without doing too much damage to our relations with Indonesia.

CHAIR:
There's a question from Denis Grant.

QUESTION:
Denis Grant, Mr Downer, from SBS Television.

Clearly in all this, the out take of the air, I suppose, in so far as Indonesia is concerned is the rising tide of secessionist, of independence sentiment in the archipelago. I wonder if we could have your analysis today on those other troubled places in Indonesia - Aceh, Ambon, Irian Jaya, and the likelihood of some form of independence or autonomy in those places?

DOWNER:
Well, Denis, you'd appreciate that I'm not a commentator. It's not for me to, you know, casually embark on a bit of analysis here of what might or might not happen. Inevitably I have my own views about it, but I think - I've said this on many, many occasions since I've been Foreign Minister and no doubt before that - that the last thing we'd want to see is the Balkanisation of Indonesia. I mean the Balkanisation of the Balkans has been enormously painful and the East Timor exercise has been, whilst in my view necessary, nevertheless painful, but to see other parts of the country breaking up and breaking off I think would be very destabilising for the region as a whole, and I think that would be a view pretty much reflected right around the international community.

It is, I'd put it to you this way. In Irian Jaya and especially in Aceh, it is a very great challenge for the Indonesian Government to find a way through which guarantees a peaceful settlement in those places and other parts of the country, yet, you know, it is a very great challenge. They're working at it.

We often use the expression in diplomacy which isn't a very exciting one, that both sides should exercise restraint. The fact is though that resort to violence in years gone by in places like Aceh by the military has only had the effect of encouraging secessionist movements, and the violent option, and I think President Wahid very well understands this, the violent option is in the end the secessionist option, the peaceful option, peaceful negotiation, clever and peaceful negotiation is likely to help to maintain the integrity of Indonesia as we know it today.

But it's a very difficult task. I mean, you know, Indonesia was the Dutch East Indies, that's what turned it into Indonesia and it's not like Thailand which was, you know, since, I don't know, the 1300s - somebody will correct me - but I think around the 1300s a quite sort of coherent and well established country, Indonesia, was in a sense a creation of colonialism, as a lot of countries around the world were. I suppose this country was in a way, but a lot of countries around the world were and are, and that has created all sorts of question marks about their boundaries.

But it's interesting that an organisation like the OAU, the Organisation of African Unity, has adopted the view which is a pretty sensible view in my opinion, that you wouldn't want to start revisiting all the colonial boundaries. That would just create chaos, so too for Asia.

CHAIR:
Peter Kholenems(?)

QUESTION:
Peter Kholenems, Sydney Morning Herald, Minister.

Look, I wonder if you'd say something about the rather flood of leaked documents which have been coming out recently. How concerned are you and the Government about this? I mean are these documents, the leaking of them, doing serious damage to the national interest as apart from causing some embarrassment to the Government, and do you agree it suggests that at least in some elements within the defence community there is a good deal of opposition to elements of the Government's policies, and, finally, what on earth are you going to do about it?

DOWNER:
Well in so far as it's alleged that the documents are leaked from the Defence establishment is obviously not my responsibility, but in the - clearly not my ministerial responsibility although I obviously have an interest in it. Do these things damage the national interest? Well yes, I suppose so. I mean what I would say though is that there's obviously somebody who has some sort of political agenda who is pushing, sort of very narrow selection of documents around in order to try to make a point and it's a very narrow selection of documents the Government receives of course the totality of documentation and gets advice from many different agencies, so to draw any conclusions from a handful of leaked documents is as I've often said, quite wrong, quite misleading and is as a matter of fact quite dishonest.

But nevertheless on the last part of your question, were there differences between Defence and my Department or differences between Defence and the position of the Government as a whole as I saw alleged by somebody the other day. To the best of my knowledge the answer to that is no.

This whole issue of East Timor has been managed throughout the year - the end of last year, or through last year and this year, with a very great sense of unity in the Government and I don't just mean between the Prime Minister, me and the Defence Minister and other Ministers who have had an interest in it, but the at least leadership of the different government departments and agencies.

For example, the suggestion that there is somehow a different of view on the strategy we should have adopted between the Defence Department and my Department is just manifestly untrue. I mean there are thousands of people in the Defence Department and there are - I see people from my Department here, they would like me to say hundreds of people in my Department - a couple of thousand - but I mean to expect all of those people to have just one view is obviously not the real world. There must be a variety of views.

But generally speaking through Defence and Foreign Affairs there has been tremendous support for what the Government has done. In fact I think I could say this about my Department which is always very discreet and very professional as you would know, but there was a real sense when we changed our policy on East Timor of relief. A real sense that we had lanced the boil, and they have been tremendously supportive of the Government as have the senior people who I've been dealing with in Defence.

This argument that there is somehow a difference boils down to what? It boils down to this proposition that somehow during the year we should have sent in a peacekeeping force and just fixed the problem of East Timor and that would have done it. Well, we couldn't. And anybody who was actually day by day engaged with the issue knows we couldn't.

They know we tried, they know we raised it with the Indonesian Government, but those people all know that it simply at the end of the day was not possible. We couldn't have done it without going to war with Indonesia. And it is cheap and glib for people to run around and say, oh, you should have sent in a peace keeping force in March or April or May or June.

How? Or we should have got the Americans who at that time were heavily engaged with the Kosovo war, we should have got them to concentrate their diplomatic, perhaps even military resources on the issue of East Timor.

We tried, and they, to be fair to the Americans, did show a good deal of interest, but they weren't about to start threatening the Indonesians in the way eventually of course they did, after the violence erupted after the result of the ballot was announced.

Earlier in the year, it just wasn't going to happen, and no amount of re-writing of history, no amount of reconstruction, no amount of extremely selective, if I may say so, extremely selective, narrowly based leaking is going to change that single fact, and inevitably the Defence Department are inquiring into leaks that took place, but in so far as there is supposed to be somebody in Defence dissatisfied with the Government's policy they are certainly not people in the senior echelons of the Defence Department. I couldn't speak for everyone in the Defence Department, and I think we're sort of pretty much tracking down where this material is coming from now.

CHAIR:
The next question is from Brendan Nicholson.

QUESTION:
Brendan Nicholson from The Age, Mr Downer.

You obviously feel strongly about the leaks. What happens if you find the people who leaked?

And a second question, the, as you said the ...

DOWNER:
It's a matter for the appropriate authorities, not for me.

QUESTION:
A significant proportion of the East Timorese population is still in West Timor at the moment. Estimates of the likely death toll in the violence that followed the ballot have ranged from a few hundred up to 80,000 - that estimate was given at a Senate hearing by an academic recently. What advice are you getting on the likely toll?

DOWNER:
Yeah. Well I've noticed some say 80,000. I think that's a confusion there. That was once said, it was said, that 80,000 people could not be accounted for, not to assume that those people had been killed, but you know, were they in the hills, were those people in the refugee camps - I don't think it was ever ... well I don't know about an academic for the Senate committee, I just don't know the answer to that, but I don't think it's been alleged that 80,000 people were killed.

But I saw it written after the violence did erupt that tens of thousands of people were killed. Now let me see. I think INTERFET have so far been able to substantiate that about, the deaths of a fairly small number of people, about 130, 140 people. That's not to say that's the end of it believe me. I think there will be a lot more than that.

This may turn out to be wrong, I just don't know. I don't want it to be quoted back at me endlessly in years ahead, completely out of context, so I qualify this very heavily in order just to answer your question. We think that the number of deaths is likely to be in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and I had a discussion yesterday with Sergio Demello (?) about this he has the same impression that we have as well. But we really don't know at this stage, but it would appear more likely to be somewhere between five hundred and a thousand than thousands of people.

We think that if there had been thousands or even as one journalist in The Australian, a commentator in The Australian newspaper wrote, tens of thousand of people have died. We think if that had been the case then INTERFET would have clearly found the evidence of that, and ...

QUESTION:
Even if they were dumped at sea ...

DOWNER:
Well even if they were dumped at sea the bodies would have washed up unless they were dumping at sea - they clearly weren't dumping at sea tens of thousands of bodies with concrete around their necks so the bodies would stay under water. I mean simply the mechanics of that would be impossible.

So this is in any case an assessment that you asked the question, this is an assessment that we would make and the UN would make. I mean I hope - look, believe me, if between five hundred and a thousand people died, that's a terrible thing. That's a lot of people to die. But, on the other hand, it's not tens of thousands.

CHAIR:
James Gribble.

QUESTION:
James Gribble from AAP, Mr Downer.

You just mentioned Sergio Demello, the Administrator for East Timor. You had talks with him yesterday, was there any development on the timing of the INTERFET troops withdrawing and the UN Blue Helmets going in sometime next year. Is there any sort of harder date with that, and can you give us a little bit of an assessment on the immediate future for East Timor once the UN takes over. You know, what will be needed, what does Indonesia need to contribute, and what will Australia need to contribute?

DOWNER:
Well first of all on the timing of the peacekeeping operation replacing INTERFET, I've said for quite a long time now, now a few months, or few weeks, that our expectation is that it would be somewhere between the middle of January and February, probably it's going to be the latter rather than the earlier part of that period. We still don't know the answer to that question.

The Secretary-General was going to make his decision very soon about who the Commander will be or those who know that the Commander is expected to be a Filipino General. Then there will be the mechanics of putting together the force. What The Philippines is going to do, what role Australia will have, what roles other countries in the region and beyond will have in that force and then getting those on the ground who aren't already on the ground and the transition from General Cosgrove as the Force Commander to the new Force Commander, obviously that's something that has to be worked out as well.

So I don't have any real update for you in terms of the actual timing of that, but our expectation is that it will be in the early part of next year.

What needs to be done? A lot. First of all a lot of money is needed. The consolidated UN appeal is for $A300 million between now and the end of June next year. $US200 million, for some reason or other they use the figure of $US199 million. But that money is starting to come in.

Australia will have, as I mentioned in my speech, will have provided by the end of the financial year somewhere in the vicinity of $74 million. We would look to the European Union to contribute generously - obviously in particular Portugal, but other members of the European Union, to the Americans, the Japanese, Canadians, and so on. But I think you'll find there will be good support from around the world, from those countries to help meet the United Nations' target.

What has to be done? Well in the very short term there's still humanitarian assistance. There's need for shelter, those sorts of things. There will be a need to reconstruct the economy as time goes on and in the medium term we expect that East Timor will probably need an aid program of somewhere in the vicinity of $A100 million a year. But it's a bit early to be sure of that. So that gives you a bit of a sense of where we're at.

CHAIR:
Question from Graeme Dobell.

QUESTION:
Prime Minister (sic) from Radio Australia.

Why has your Government walked away from the hierarchy you set in your Foreign Policy White Paper which put Indonesia and China up there with the United States and Japan. What is the benefit to the national interest by a gratuitous down-grading of what Australia seeks to achieve with China and Indonesia, and more specifically, do you believe that the Wahid Government has taken an actual decision to take a hands-off approach to Middle East asylum seekers who come in through their airports and then board boats to Australia. Is the Wahid Government actually deciding to send a message to Australia about why it is special?
DOWNER: Well if I may say so, I think that's a sort of obscure misinterpretation of what I'm saying. I'm saying it in our foreign policy we thought that having, using the rubric of special relationships simply set up false expectations that if, to put it another way from the way I put it in the speech, there would be an assumption that those countries wouldn't work in each other's national interest but would do favours for each other way over and above that, and expectation that will only inevitably be dashed and cause disappointment.

I've said nothing gratuitous or I've done no gratuitous down-grading of any relationship. What we've said in the White Paper was that the four most important relationships for Australia for geo-political and economic reasons and reasons even beyond that, the four most important relationships for Australia were the four that you mentioned - Indonesia, China, Japan and the United States, and we haven't changed that assessment at all. They are the four most important relationships for Australia, you know, for different reasons, but it is clear those relationships are of particular importance, and, you know, inevitably with Indonesia we've gone through a difficult period, a period of strain, which, you know, we don't walk away from. That's a fact of life.

A lot of people in Australia have felt, well most people in Australia, have felt very strongly about what happened in East Timor particularly after the result of the ballot was announced on 5 September, and that obviously did lead to a deterioration in our relationship and, you know, I think Indonesia had a sense of, you know, humiliation, when the International Force came in and took over East Timor and Australia was the leader of that International Force.

But that's not to say we regard the relationship with Indonesia as suddenly unimportant or that we're down-grading it. It remains one of our four most important relationships, and that, I think, is a statement that would stand any test of time, and probably in a 100 years when the foreign minister stands here it will be true that those relationships will remain, will probably remain the four most important for a country like Australia. Who would know?

As for the Middle East, well, there are refugees coming from the Middle East. Well our Ambassador has been talking to Ministers in Jakarta and has found those talks pretty productive and they've given undertakings to investigate the issue and for discussions to continue. There hasn't been any sense by the Indonesian Ministers that we've been speaking to that frankly they didn't care about this issue, or they wanted to teach Australia a lesson or something like that.

It goes back to what I said earlier. It is in Indonesia's interests to build a constructive relationship with Australia, not just in Australia's interests to build a constructive relationship with Indonesia, and so they need to handle the issues which are of concern to Australia in a responsible way and our impression is that they are.

This suggestion that somehow the Indonesian Government doesn't care about the representations we've been making in relation to the Middle East refugees is apparently born out of an answer that President Wahid gave to a question that was asked of him by all accounts completely out of the blue at a press conference, and that, you know, refugees coming to Australia were a matter for the Australian authorities. Well, you know, I think you shouldn't place too heavy an interpretation on an answer given to a question out of the blue by the President. I think that's quite an unfair interpretation to put on his remarks. It's unfair to him to put that interpretation on his remarks.

We need to do more with Indonesia on this issue and we will be doing more and certainly when I do visit Indonesia it will be one of the issues that will be at the top of my agenda.

CHAIR:
Well Minister, thank you very much for joining us again today. Do come back.

I'd like to give you a small trophy to remind you of the occasion. It's been a fascinating hour, and good luck for the Year 2000.

DOWNER: Thank you.

[Applause].

ENDS