Monday, 26 June 2023
Sydney International Convention Centre, Pyrmont
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

In greeting you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

Tonight, with so many dignitaries present and all who have made a vital contribution to the Australian-ASEAN Business Forum, I greet you simply with those two Gadigal words: Eora Bugeri – Good people

However, I must specifically thank the Organising Chairman Mr Francis Wong and His Excellency Dr Siswo Pramono for the invitation to attend.

Fifty-six years ago, on 8^th August 1967, the Foreign Ministers of 5 nations – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – met in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Bangkok and signed the ASEAN Declaration. That Declaration and the 5 high-level provisions it contained continue today to underpin the regional co-operation that is the essence of the ASEAN pact: friendship, co-operation, peace, security, and prosperity for the region its member countries encompass.

ASEAN now comprises 10 nations and has 10 Dialogue partners, of which Australia was the first. These matters are well known to you, as is the development of trade, cultural, educational, diplomatic, and other people-to-people relations within ASEAN and externally, and in which many of you participate on a daily basis. The details of those relationships and their opportunities have been discussed throughout today’s Forum.

Tonight, I wish to address something different, and in broader brushstrokes: the development of Australia’s own understanding of its relationship with Asia, and ASEAN member countries in particular, and the structural interrelationship of countries in our region. It is a big topic, but I assure you I will be brief.

In 1992, an article appeared in the New York Times with the headline Australia is striving to be Asian, but How Asian? In that article, then Prime Minister Paul Keating was quoted as referring to Australia not as “the odd man out” in Asia, but, rather, “the odd man in”.[1]

It was an idea he had voiced in a speech a few months previously. “Geophysically speaking,” he had said, “this continent [Australia] is old Asia. In 1992, we shouldn’t think that we’re anything less than a rightful presence in the region… What is true politically is also true economically”[2].

Australia already had a strong trade relationship with Asia, and, relevant to today’s discussions, with ASEAN members: ASEAN countries at that time took 12% of Australian exports, more than both the US and the EU. However, as the Prime Minister recognized, more difficult than structural reform of our trading relationships, was the need for “cultural reform, the reform of our outlook”.[3]

Four years later, in a speech in Singapore, Keating returned to this theme, noting that Australia’s engagement with its nearest region was “not just commercial… not the result of some crude economic determinism.” Rather, it was “a genuine desire for partnership and real involvement”[4].

I have referred to these two speeches because, although Australia’s trade relations with the region, including ASEAN members, had accelerated markedly following World War II, the Prime Minister’s observations were an acknowledgement that our national outlook needed to shift, or more accurately, catch up, so that there was synchronicity across all aspects of our regional relationships and, most particularly, our understanding and people-to-people connections.

This trend has continued under successive governments of both political persuasions.

The other matter which does not go unnoticed in this audience is the multilateral nature of international relationships. By way of example – and referring only to the formal structures and not the myriad trade agreements and other engagements that sit underneath them – 7 ASEAN countries are members of APEC, as are 6 of ASEAN’s Dialogue Partners; 3 ASEAN countries and 3 Dialogue Partners are members of the 56-member Commonwealth of Nations.

Today, just over half Australia’s population was born overseas or has a parent or grandparent born overseas, with some 270 ancestries and over 300 languages spoken. It is hard not to have a friend who comes from a diverse ancestry. And, as we know, the Australian population from ASEAN countries is undergoing rapid growth; one third of that population lives in New South Wales.

In 2022, Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong, herself of Malaysian ancestry, delivered a speech in Singapore in which her reason as to “Why ASEAN matters” was emphatic in its simplicity. In bringing order, security, and prosperity to our region, “ASEAN is indispensable.”[5]

To borrow from the theme of Indonesia’s Chairmanship, ASEAN is a global “epicentrum of growth”[6].

These are statements with which no-one in Australia now quibbles. The cultural shift which started all those decades ago is, today, a comfortable reality. As Tim Harcourt of the Lowy Institute so concisely put it, the “tyranny of distance” mantra that once dominated Australia’s international and trade relations has long been surpassed by the “power of proximity.”[7]

And we experienced this on our recent Vice Regal Mission to Vietnam and Indonesia, supported by Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner for ASEAN, Andrew Parker, who leads our State’s trade engagement in South East Asia.

Today’s Forum and this Gala Dinner continue to facilitate the on-going constructive dialogue which will advance our individual countries and the prosperity of this region.

I extend my congratulations and thanks to the organisers for your work in bringing together the relevant stakeholders with a program which is directed to ensuring that that goal will be achieved.

[1] David E. Sangar, ‘Australia is Striving to be Asian, but How Asian?’, in New York Times Online, August 1992; available here

[2] ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, the Honourable P J Keating Australia and Asia: Knowing Who We Are 7 April 1992’; available here

[3] ibid

[4] ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, the Hon P J Keating MP: The Singapore Lecture “Australia, Asia and the New Regionalism” Singapore, 17 January 1996’; available here

[5] Senator the Honourable Penny Wong, ‘Special Lecture to the International for Strategic Studies – A Shared Future: Australia, ASEAN, and Southeast Asia’, Singapore 6 July 2022; available at: here

[6] ‘Chairman’s statement of the 43^rd ASEAN Summit’; available here

[7] Tim Harcourt, ‘The Asian Century: From the Tyranny of Distance to the Power of Proximity’, February 2020, Australian Institute of International Affairs Online; available here