Interview on BBC Radio World Service

Subjects: Global Alliance on Vaccinations and Immunisations, Australia’s role in Asia, China, Asian regional institutional architecture

Transcript, E&OE, proof only

12 June 2011

JOURNALIST: Welcome to London.

KEVIN RUDD: Thank you. Let me tell you about GAVI. Unless we have kids surviving through to the age of five, whatever we do subsequently on education or other forms of overseas development assistance will be irrelevant if those kids die.

So GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunisation, in the last decade has vaccinated 250 million kids, saved more than five million lives, brought up immunisation rates across developing countries to about 80 per cent.

This has been an extraordinary achievement by the international community. So in London, the British Government is convening a conference which starts tonight asking the international community to commit more.

We Australia will do so and we think it’s the right thing to do. What I will announce tonight is that we are lending a further $200 million to this cause.

JOURNALIST: Putting the money in is one thing but the delivery of that is complicated because of situations on the ground? Do you think it’s an efficient way of improving child health?

KEVIN RUDD: It’s probably the most efficient in the world. There is little that can go wrong between making a commitment on the one hand, the physical purchase of the known vaccines on the other and the physical immunisation of children.

It is universally regarded, including an independent review of aid effectiveness as one of the best ways to make a difference on the ground. Not only in our own region in countries such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, are the beneficiaries.

In Southeast Asian countries such as Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and in South Asia, countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. All of these countries as well as in Africa. We are determined to make a difference; we intend to become one of the substantial global backers of this immunisation campaign world-wide because against all effectiveness measures, keeping kids alive who are under five, is fundamental to whatever else we can provide to a young person’s life.

JOURNALIST: How do you see Australia’s role in the growing importance of Asia in global politics and economics?

KEVIN RUDD: Well whatever language we use, that might be used about us, we are integral to the future of Asia.

We are members of most of the founding institutions of Asia. We are a founding member of the East Asian Summit. A founding member of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Program, a founding member of the ASEAN regional program to deal with security, we are totally integrated economically and institutionally in the affairs of our neighbourhood.

And in terms of our future, our challenge is this. If you reflect for a moment on Europe, a continent which after centuries of butchery, concluded after the Second World War that there was a better way and began to form something known as the European Community now the European Union.

There are some lessons to be learnt from that experience by those of us in Asia. In our part of the world where we’ve got so many underlying territorial disputes between countries of the region, many of whom are nuclear armed, it is time for us to begin to roll out institutional arrangements which begin to create rules of the road for economies and countries which will become hugely significant by global standards.

JOURNALIST: Clearly the main player in the region is China and Australia must be concerned about its relationship with China. You’ve described recently the desirable relationship as being a ‘zhengyou’, a true friend, one who speaks sometimes unpalatable truths to China. How do you see that working?

KEVIN RUDD: China is part and parcel of the emerging regional challenge that I spoke about before. A long set of territorial disputes – whether its on the Korean Peninsula, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, but also disputes not involving China like Kashmir, or elsewhere.

Our job as a region is to fashion institutions which can, shall I say, take some of this friction away or when it arises handle it in a regional way through confidence and security building measures. We are doing that through the East Asia Summit which this year, and for the first time with the Americans.

JOURNALIST: Institutions depend I suppose on the bona fides of the people involved in them. A lot of people have concerns about what China’s real intentions are.

In the Brookings Institution speech recently you mentioned that China is a non status quo power. Could you explain what that means and what that might mean for institutions?

KEVIN RUDD: Well let’s simply call a spade a spade. China has gone from being an economy in 1990 the size of Australia’s to an economy today which is the second largest in the world. By definitions that’s not status quo that’s changing.

The Chinese economy in the next twenty years will become easily the largest in the world. That means that China’s global economic policy activism its global economic activism, its global foreign policy activism, and its security policy footprint will change as well.

So the challenge is this: do we as an international community, particularly as a community of nations in East Asia, gather round with our Chinese friends to help shape a common future in East Asia with rules of the road as Europe for example began evolving with the Helsinki process in the 1970s, the CSEC process which evolved out of that and now you have an OSEC.

How do we being to evolve those sorts of institutions and understanding and habits of co-operation in East Asia when historically there have been none.

We have one huge success story on the table. It is the Association of South East Asian Nations which forty years ago pitted frankly non-communist Southeast Asia against communist Indochina.

Forty years later we’re all around the same table working broadly towards the same rules of the road with a broad ambition towards forming a Southeast Asian community by 2015.

I think we should take a lesson out of their books, begin work on the wider region and put our shoulders to the wheel. Otherwise you simply allow bilateral tensions to emerge, dominate and heaven forbid get out of control.

ENDS

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