A STEP TO THE RIGHT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALEXANDER DOWNER – ALEXANDER DOWNER

By the time Alexander Downer left office, he had eclipsed Bert Evatt and Richard Casey to become Australia’s longest-serving Foreign Affairs Minister. Over nearly 12 years on the world stage, he negotiated with presidents, prime ministers, and powerbrokers to advance and defend Australia’s interests. It was a modern odyssey through wars, upheavals, and shifting alliances, as Downer sought to balance the ambitions of the United States and China while forging stronger ties with Indonesia. On Wednesday 4 February 2026, Tony Parkinson, journalist and author of A Step To The Right: The Life And Times Of Alexander Downer, addressed The Sydney Institute along with The Hon Alexander Downer to reflect on the highlights of Australia’s longest serving foreign minister.

A STEP TO THE RIGHT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALEXANDER DOWNER

ALEXANDER DOWNER

It’s a great pleasure to come to The Sydney Institute again. I don’t think I’ve been here since I was the foreign minister, and that term came to an end in December 2007. So, it’s a very long time.

I’ve done a lot of things since then. It’s kind of embarrassing to have a book written about you. I don’t know whether any of you have had that experience, and I have never had that experience before. There are two things to say about that. A lot of people tried to persuade me to write an autobiography, but I thought it would be bad for my mental health, to sit down for six months and just think about myself. I’ve always thought it’s very unhealthy to become too obsessed with yourself. If you’re feeling depressed, stop thinking about yourself. That’s the advice I give my children. So, anyway, Tony can explain how he came to be writing this biography as a kind of substitute for that. It isn’t an authorised biography in the sense that I authorised it, but I did do many hours of interviews with Tony to explain why I believed in things, where I came from, and so on.

First of all, my family, it’s quite well known, has been a political family for a very long time. My grandfather, whom I never knew, and who died in 1915, was the premier of South Australia. He was also Senator and one of the authors of the Constitution. More relevant to today, my father was a member of federal parliament when I was born. So, until he retired from parliament in 1963, I only knew life as a child with politics all around me. As children, my three sister and I were made to listen to our parents regaling each other, and sometimes us, with stories of politics. We also had distinguished politicians of one kind or another visit our house.

This is not much of a boast, but I’ve often said I’m one of the few people who has met every single leader the Liberal Party has ever had – from Sir Robert Menzies, the first leader, to Sussan Ley whom I know quite well. I was a member of parliament with Sussan Ley for some seven years.

That was the sort of environment I grew up in, a very political environment Although it is not just that environment. It’s not just that I knew politicians. Sir Robert Menzies would come and stay with us and smoke cigars in my father’s study. You wouldn’t do that anymore. He lit up huge cigars, and the whole house just stank of cigars for days after the great man had stayed. The real effect was the values that I took from the discussions that I heard and, subliminally, absorbed the ideas that were all around me.

One of those ideas was that such people who had committed their, or part of their careers, perhaps in some cases most of their careers, to politics, were people who you might call nation builders. We can quibble over the language but they had this idea that Australia was a new nation charting a new course, and was going to achieve a society which European societies and North American societies had failed to achieve. So, there was an ambition for prosperity. There was an ambition for Australia being, to use a phrase, a property owning democracy. There was an ambition for it to be an egalitarian society, a democratic society, but there was an ambition to build Australia.

We were talking earlier this evening about the importance of immigration. My father was the Minister for Immigration for nearly six years. The whole concept of building up our population and of integrating people from different parts of the world, who’ve had different experiences in other parts of the world, into this great society, this new society of Australia, was very much part of the ambition that my father had.

We were taken overseas. I was a seven year-old and went with my parents. My father went to Europe to drum up migrants, to get people to migrate to Australia. He particularly wanted to get more women to migrate to Australia. He thought we were a bit short on women. In any case, this was all part of the concept of nation building and was very much part of the way I saw the job of an Australian politician.

From the book, you’ll find out what I did in all those years. When I became a member of parliament, I was tremendously excited. For me, to be a member of parliament was to be one of those people who could really contribute to building the nation. Nowadays, I don’t hear very much of that anymore, and I don’t have the sense so much of it coming from the parliament anymore. It isn’t the time to discuss the current political scene, but in those days, there were all sorts of ways that I thought we could improve Australia. In my maiden speech, I talked quite a lot about economics, about the need to stimulate investment, that investment could be driven by consumer choice, not driven by the dictates of corporates or from corporatists or from politicians, but by the desires of consumers, and that would generate democratic growth in society.

I talked quite a lot about those kinds of concepts in my maiden speech. But I also talked about foreign policy, because my view of Australian foreign policy was always that as a country we had to try to contribute to a stable regional environment, as best we possibly could. And there were mechanisms we could use in order to do that. Why do I say that? Because if ever there were to be a threat to Australia, or, should I say, a threat again, to Australia, it would come through the collapse of the security environment of the countries around us. Almost no one here is going to agree with me about this, but I’m one of those few people who think that the Vietnam War may not have ended very well, but it was worth fighting because it gave Southeast Asia ten years in order to organise itself and stop the communist insurgencies that there were in countries like Thailand, Malaya, Malaysia as it became, Singapore, Indonesia and so on. It generated an opportunity, and Southeast Asia took that opportunity. Had that not happened, had Southeast Asia been embroiled, more generally, in conflict – and there were conflicts from time to time there – then our security would have been challenged and threatened in ways that it wasn’t.

I always believed, and I still believe in the importance of the American Alliance. There’s an absurd phrase that is used in Australia by particularly the political left, that we should have a more independent foreign policy. Well, just for the benefit of those people who make those kinds of statements, I was the foreign minister of this country for nearly 12 years, and never did it occur to me that our foreign policy was anything but independent. We were entirely independent. Of course, we can make all sorts of choices if we wish to do that. But I knew, and I still know, that having the United States underwriting the balance of power in the Indo Pacific region, as we now call it, the Asia Pacific region, is fundamental to the stability and the security of that region.

There’s a price we pay for that alliance with the United States. And there’s a price for Japan and South Korea and the Philippines, all countries which in the region who are allies of the United States, do pay for that, because you can’t be a one way ally. You can’t say to somebody, I’m your ally, but I’m actually going to take the Alliance à la carte. If your interests are threatened, I may not bother to help you, but if my interests are threatened, I really need you to help me. So, if you want to know why we responded to 9/11 in the way that we did, we did it because we needed America to shore up its alliances with countries like Japan, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines in this part of the world by demonstrating our goodwill and support for them in their hour of need. After 9/11 that was their hour of need.

Australia sent troops to Afghanistan, as you know; we also sent troops to Iraq. These were controversial decisions, but they were hugely appreciated by the United States, whatever President Trump may say today. And dare I say it, I don’t think if we had been an à la carte ally and just worried about what our domestic opinion polls said, in terms of the alliance, we would never have achieved a free trade agreement with the United States. That was a function of the United States administration being appreciative of us being a stalwart ally.

Let me repeat the point that the importance of this alliance is to underwrite the power balance in the Indo Pacific region. For those people who wish to move away from the United States, think about what the Indo Pacific region would be like with the United States withdrawing from the region. We would be dominated by China, and China would determine the rules of trade. It would determine the security architecture of the region; it would try to impose values that we don’t share as a liberal democracy on the region. So, if you’re in favour of getting rid of the American Alliance, you’re in favour of a region which would look like that, and it would be, by the way, a very much more unstable region than we currently have. As a minister, I spent most of my time talking about that, because that was a big issue for me in foreign policy.

There is a fatuous argument that Liberal governments weren’t interested in Asia and it was only Labor which drove our foreign policy towards Asia. As the son of a prisoner of war of the Japanese for three and a half years in the Changi prisoner of war camp, I have never heard anything more absurd. It was in Asia where much of the Australian Army was when the fall of Singapore happened. The Vietnam War was in Asia, and our contribution to that, I’ve already discussed. The Korean War we played out part in, in Asia. Asia has been a preoccupation for Labor governments, but a preoccupation for Liberal governments as well. It was, after all the government of Sir Robert Menzies in 1957 with the commerce agreement with Japan that opened the door to the huge explosion of Australian trade with Asia.

I mention those things because so much of my work was taken up dealing with issues in Asia.  There was the Asian financial crisis, where we were a developed country that supported all three bailout packages for Thailand, Indonesia and the Republic of Korea, South Korea. We had the East Timor crisis that you’re familiar with. We did a lot of work in the South Pacific, working very closely with the New Zealanders, who deserve a lot of credit for this, bringing to an end the civil war in Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea. We bailed out the Solomon Islands. We helped with a massive amount of support for Asia with the tsunami, particularly for Indonesia. The notion that we weren’t interested in Asia is one of the most fatuous arguments I have ever heard, speaking from a position of some experience.

They’re not here tonight, but I just want to pay tribute to my wife, Nicky. She’s been a wonderful support to me through all of that period, also my sisters Stella, Una and Angela, who lives in the United States. They’ve always been a wonderful support. And there are my children, four of them. I have been a wonderful support to them and they’re all living happily ever after now. So, life has been great, and I’m hoping it will go on for a little bit longer.