26 November 2011
Posted in
National News
The stark reality is that Australia needs to be more outward-looking than at any time in its history, said Kevin Rudd, foreign minister, delivering the AIIA NSW 2011 Charteris lecture, on November 24. Mr Rudd told a 268-strong audience, at Tattersalls Club in Sydney, which including the envoys in Australia from 38 countries, that there was now no alternative but to be comprehensively globally engaged. “The option of pulling up the physical or psychological drawbridge is pure fantasy – although political populists from time to time seek to breathe life into such fantasy. “The possibility of a little Australia, an inward-looking Australia, let alone a xenophobic Australia (along with those who would fuel the fires of such xenophobia), has long passed us by. Our future is made of different stuff.” Mr Rudd praised the AIIA for playing a leading a role in stimulating discussion of international affairs in a country “which embraces diversity, rather than nostalgia for the monoculture”. In his Charteris lecture, named after Archibald Charteris, the founder of the AIIA, the foreign minister said he sensed one thing, and one thing alone, across the country at present, and that was that “ that Australians are tired of wall to wall negativity. They are fed up with it. “Whatever the perceived utility of the politics of negativity may have on the domestic front today, the politics of negativity are downright damaging on the foreign front.” Mr Rudd listed ten goals for foreign policy which he said added up to “Australia to be seen around the world as a good country and Australians as a good people.............and also a nation that, at the dawn of this Asian Century, is the most Asia-literate country in the collective West for whom the language and civilisations of Asia are no longer foreign but familiar.” In a review of foreign policy achievements, one was the new policy to ensure diplomats had proper language skills. “ “When we came to office, we didn’t have for example any Chinese or Japanese-speaking ambassadors.”, he said. “Today, our new heads of mission in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Dili, Honiara, Jakarta, Lima, Nicosia, Rome, Tokyo and Vientiane all have the necessary language proficiency – none of those posts had heads of mission who were proficient in the local language in 2007.” Colin Chapman, president of the AIIA in NSW, expressed delight that so many foreign ambassadors and high commissions , including the dean of the diplomatic corps, Argentine ambassador Pedro Delgrado, had accepted the institute’s invitation to come to Sydney, and said it was a tribute to the high regard in which the foreign minister was held. DOWNLOAD A COPY OF KEVIN RUDD'S SPEECH click http://www.aiia.asn.au/nsw-papers