Does a request for support from the US automatically and always pre-empt Australian policy and budgets at the expense of education, health and welfare, and if not, how should we decide which requests to refuse? (David Roffey)

Kerry Nettle; Aden Ridgeway; Marise Payne; David Roffey

Kevin Rudd: Just to add a footnote on what Brendan said before, as well. He said, I think, that what this country needs to do is to rediscover compassion. Can I just say it would be a sign of our collective maturation as an Australian foreign policy community when we get to the stage when our national political leadership of the left and the right can say, without apology, what is the compassionate response to this problem we see in the in the international community. What is the compassionate response to what we see unfolding in Indonesia? What is the compassionate response to what we see unfolding in Iraq? Kerry was talking before about the humanitarian consequences on the ground. Compassion has become a dirty word in Australian national politics and it shouldn’t be. It is, I think, an expression of our collective humanity to think about the impact of our actions on others - other communities, other countries and to think first about what we can do to better those conditions, and to start that process we actually need to rehabilitate the vocabulary of compassion in our national political discourse. So that’s a long way of saying ‘yes’. But I feel quite deeply about that.

On the US thing – well our view has been that an alliance with the United States does not equal compliance to the United States. We don’t apologise for that. That’s been our view for 50 years.

We also think we’ve got a right to say that, because we started the alliance in the first place. In 1941, though John Howard never admits that fact. If Menzies had remained as Prime Minister in 1941 I think he would have still been waiting for Churchill to sail capital ships across the seas to liberate us - and waited desperately for them to arrive. Curtin looked to America. This country had no other option in '41 and in the context of the times in was an extraordinarily radical step, given where this country had been for the previous 150 years of its settled history and foreign policy which operated largely under the rubric of the two word defence doctrine “Rule Brittania.”

But we have never seen this as being a recipe for saying yes to everything that any US administration wants. Remember it was the Australian Labor Party which opposed the war in Vietnam. We opposed it then. We thought it was a wrong decision and I believe history has vindicated the posture we took then. It was the Australian Labor Party which opposed the war in Iraq, we believed it was the wrong decision, and we’ve argued that, and some said at the time, to our political cost, but we believed it was the wrong decision for the reasons of international law that I outlined before.

The other thing where I think Mr. Howard misleads us is to assume that there has always been this automatic support in Washington in previous US administrations for Australian national interests at given times - look to the history books: what did various US administrations say to then Australian Governments, usually conservative, when there was a conflict between Australia and Indonesia, at the time of confrontation, confrontasi? What happened with the conflict between Australia and Indonesia over the future of Dutch New Guinea, as it then was? What happened when the Nixon administration proclaimed the "Guam Doctrine”? The tabloid summary of which was in 1968 - ”allies get to look after their own security and interests in their own region. We will only intervene if there is an attack on them by the global superpower” namely at that stage the Soviet Union.

And most recently in 1999, remember Howard’s claim and call for “boots on the ground” in East Timor from the United States? What happened?

Now all I’m saying is, let’s just put this into a little bit of historical context. That’s why we have absolutely no apology to make about

a) being initiators of this alliance, but

b) always asserting ourselves that the independence of this country and its foreign policy comes first.

Our interpretation of what is right for this country against the principles of International law shall be the barometer, and if that means disagreeing with the United States from time to time on critical issues of foreign policy, regional policy, global policy we will do that; and we will do so in the framework of an alliance which we have consistently supported for sixty years.

Kerry Nettle: If we do make decisions based on consistently prioritising the US alliance, the US alliance does not bring us security and it doesn’t bring us our own interests, and it isn’t just in the area of defence matters this is the case, it’s also in the area of trade. I touched on before, the US Australia Free Trade Agreement. If we want to protect things like our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – we shouldn’t believe Government when it says it won’t be impacted on, because when we get to see the text we find out the variety of different ways by which our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme will be impacted on by the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

The question also talks to the impact on budgetary decisions that are made by the government, and people should watch closely when, one week from tomorrow, the budget comes down. Watch closely for how much the defence budget goes up. I’m sure many of you read the investigation in the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend about defence expenditure. There’s fifty billion dollars there which the Greens say should be bringing us real security, by being spent as aid money, that helps and assists our regional neighbours and develops stronger relationships between Australia and their governments that bring us genuine ongoing and lasting security.

The other thing to look out for in that budget, and again it comes out of the question, is, the Australian population are crying out for spending on public services, like health, education and welfare. With a $4 dollar a week tax cut – the polls in the Sydney Morning Herald said 77% of Australians wanted that money to be spent on health and education. Now this time around people were being asked in a poll question by AC Nielson – what about if you're given $10? An even stronger response came back – no, we want that money spent on health and education.

After the last budget, myself and Bob Brown sat by ourselves on one side of the chamber and we voted for that $4 a week tax cut to go into tertiary education in this country to make it free for students. I’m hoping that in a week or so’s time we are not sitting alone again on the other side of the chamber voting for services instead of tax cuts.

Aden Ridgeway: I suppose the question highlights a number of things for me – the first is, I wasn’t aware that the US makes requests on anything that has a financial cost to us other than military action. Certainly there has been cause to support it diplomatically in arenas like the UN, and certainly in relation to things like the signing of the Kyoto protocol - what I do want to say about it though, is that I think that the way that we have shaped our foreign policy is that it's allowed us to write off something that is a pre-emptive strike of the US against Australian independence. They get to make the decisions, they get to call the shots and we just have to follow suit.

I think if anything, if we are talking about the budget coming up, we say without question in the Democrats, forget about the tax cuts and forget about the top end of town. If people are saying that they want the money spent on much needed social services then that should be spent where it is most needed.

I make no bones about the fact that even in the last couple of weeks that the Democrats have been launching various budget announcements. One thing I think, that does need to be resolved in this country, is the crisis in indigenous health. It goes without saying that if the Deeble Report and the AMA are both saying that 300 million dollars is all that is required to spend to bring up to par, just like any other Australian, then that’s no more than what we are spending in one week on defence in this country.

How can we say that we have a moral conscience when we have a crisis in our backyard and we're not responding appropriately when it comes to the budget?

We seem to have a government that somehow gets out there and tells the population (cons them at least) that they are going to get a tax cut. This time around it might give them a milkshake and maybe a hamburger: I’m waiting to see what the next headlines are. The reality is that the US shouldn’t be telling us. We shouldn’t be entering into a free trade agreement that, from my reckoning, doesn’t deliver any great benefits and if it does – that’s going to be about increasing the cost of medicines in this country let alone anything else that’s been spoken about.

I think most of all, we ought to be talking about keeping our eye on the future, that is, the next generation of young people. And if anyone can come forward and say that they have done the reckoning and they can find that there are going to be benefits for Australia under a free trade agreement, then I'd like to see it.

It’s not about being anti-American. It’s about being pro-Australian. It’s about us making decisions about the things that matter most to us and targeting any of those circumstances and any decisions in our budget to those areas of greatest need – least of all lessening the gap between the rich and the poor in this country.

Marise Payne: The first thing I'd like to say is that I don't necessarily accept the premise on which the question is put, that Australia automatically and always accepts requests for support form the United States, but I'm not going to walk away from the fact that we place a major priority on the strength of our relationship and our alliance with the United States. I'm not going to walk away from that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is security in our region, and more broadly, and the long-term aspects of the relationship which do mean that we share basic democratic processes, that we share ... have a long record of cooperation, and the security alliance is part of a practical manifestation of those values. But it doesn't mean that we're not simultaneously in the process of enhancing our regional relationships as well. It doesn't mean that we're not enhancing our relationships with Indonesia, with New Zealand, with the Philippines, with Singapore ... and in fact the list goes on, in recognition of the regional challenge that we currently face. We can do more than one thing at a time, and we do.

In relation to budgetary issues, and the priorities that are placed on particular issues, the first thing I would say is that humble back-benchers are not exposed to the budget before its release next week either, but there is obviously some discussion around at the moment about the sorts of issues that members of the panel have raised tonight, and I just wanted to - to one of those, which is the question of whether there will be enhanced spending in the areas of security, intelligence and defence. We're actually not in a position to walk away from the challenges that international terrorism places for Australia as well as every other western democracy and a whole range of other nations. We're not in a position to do that, and if ultimately we don't support the agencies and the organisations that we charge with the responsibility of protecting this nation, and we don't support them properly in this environment, then we will be culpable in the event of further atrocities in our region which we may have been able to assist with. And I think that's a very important fact to recognise: we cannot walk away from that.

In relation to the FTA, I read a press statement on Friday from the Centre for International Economics, I think, if I have the acronym correctly, which indicated that their analysis shows a benefit to the Australian economy, across a vast range of areas of the economy of 6.1 billion dollars annualy within a decade. Now, these are the sorts of future-looking things, forward-looking things, that one of the other panellists, perhaps Kerry, referred to - I'm sure that's not what she meant, but it's a point that I'd like to take up, and say that these are important issues for Australia to consider as well, in trade terms, and I think we can't turn our back on those.

Shelley Reys: Thank you, Marise. And – David Roffey, do you have anything you would like to add, or comment in the light of what’s been said?

David Roffey: Some of what I wanted to say has been said by the speakers, but it bears repeating.

Just over a week ago [Anzac Day] we commemorated, as we do every year, the fact that a large number of young Australians died invading a country, Turkey, with which we had no argument whatsoever, on behalf of another power. And, as Kevin has already said, in 1941 that power failed to turn up in its turn and support us, and we changed our minds about which power we needed to go to. Those of you who have seen The Fog of War, which is an interesting couple of hours in the company of Robert McNamara, who was LBJ’s Secretary of Defence – “All the way with LBJ”, and we again sent young Australians to go and die in a country with which we had no argument whatsoever – and what did that do for us? It’s very interesting for an Australian to listen to Robert McNamara, because in the middle of that film he says, and I quote: “None of our allies supported us in Vietnam: nobody came to our aid – nobody important – France, Germany, Japan, the UK, none of them.” So, here was LBJ’s Secretary of Defence, and he didn’t remember that we did it. So they died for nothing.

So now we’re off doing it again.

And what is the support of America worth, and how much does it actually do for us? We’ve not signed up to the Kyoto agreement, which the State Premiers have released a report which shows that, not only has it the chance of saving our grandchildren’s lives from some pretty awful effects, but it would actually be a net economic benefit to Australia if we signed up. We signed up to the Free Trade Agreement, which is our “reward” in quotes: well that report that Marise mentioned is the most shonky piece of economics I’ve ever seen. 41 out of the 58 billion dollars of net benefit that it talks about over the next ten years comes from the benefits of relaxed rules on foreign investment in Australia. No US investment in Australia has ever been turned down under the old rules, so where are we going to get all this money from? Well I can tell what would add up to about $41billion, you let American firms buy Telstra and Qantas, which I think are just about the only firms that there is actually a difference under the free trade agreement – but do we want that to happen?

How much does it actually matter – and some of this has already been said by Kevin – how much does it actually matter whether you support America or not. Well, you can be against America and do the most appalling things and they’ll support you.

Syria undoubtedly planted the bomb that caused PanAm103 to crash at Lockerbie, but two years into the investigation of that, they joined in in the Gulf War 1, and suddenly the blame shifts to Libya. If they’re on our side, it’s OK. We went into Iraq, as has already been discussed, with the claim that, if we didn’t, terrible weapons would be passed to other members of the “Axis of Evil”. Well, we now know that Iraq had certainly no nuclear capability. Who did have nuclear capability? Who was passing nuclear secrets to other members of the “Axis of Evil”? A member of the Coalition of the Willing – Pakistan. Has America gone against them because they did that? – No.

So, actively opposing them can still get you American support. Standing with them doesn’t necessarily get you any support at all. In the case that might be most relevant to the question of terrorism, which has already been brought up, for 30 years, the country that you can tell from my accent I came from [the UK] had bombs going off in the streets of its capital, on a regular basis. The building that I used to work in, that was on top of Victoria Station, there was a period in which we had to be evacuated because of a bomb scare in the station beneath us, approximately once a week. And where did the funding for that come from? It cam e almost entirely from the United States – not from the government, but from private individuals. But when the British Government went to America and said: “please can you do something about stopping this support for terrorism on our land?”, they had absolutely no government action whatsoever.

So, being on their side gets you nothing - being against them can still get support. So the whole tenor of the debate as Mr Howard puts it, about how we need to keep up with these important – we need to stick, as the Defence Policy statement effectively says, paraphrasing it, we need to stick with the biggest bully in the playground so they’re on our side when the fight starts. But if it’s in their interests they’ll be there anyway, and if it's not in their interests they won’t turn up.

One last thing: the US State Department’s recently released annual report on international terrorism repeats again that about 300 people a year get killed by international terrorism – that obviously went up in 2001, and again in 2002, though not in 2003, when it actually went down. 300 people a year die from international terrorism. How much are we prepared to pay to stop that – knowing that, someone who is prepared to die can essentially not be stopped without losing all the freedoms we say we’re fighting for? When at the same time, hundreds of Australians are dying from diseases; many, many thousands of children are dying in the Third World for lack of food. Security comes out of believing that we live in a world where we don’t have to fight and shoot in order to get a decent way to live: security comes out of knowing that your hospital is in a good enough condition to be able to treat you if you need emergency treatment at that time. We can spend some of those billions on that sort of security, and not on taking away the freedoms that the rest of us have. Thank you.

Shelley Reys: May I remind you that this is your last opportunity to write a question down, and to give it to one of the people wearing badges. Question 4 comes from Jim Wilks ...

© NSPD 2004. Last modified 16/05/04.