Diary Of A Foreign Minister

Six years after vacating his position as the longest-serving Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr returned to politics in his dream job: as Foreign Minister of Australia and a senior federal cabinet minister. For 18 months he kept a diary documenting a whirl of high-stakes events on the world stage – the election of Australia to the UN Security Council, the war in Syria and meetings with the most powerful people on the planet. To reflect on how all this became a book, Bob Carr spoke for The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 27 May 2014. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of the speech.

DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER

BOB CARR

It’s a great pleasure to be at The Sydney Institute again. I’ve worked with and respected its contribution to intellectual life in Sydney over many years. Anne’s forthcoming book on Menzies deserves all our attention. Robert Menzies is fascinating.

So, why a diary for a former foreign minister? In large measure, it’s unethical. I reproduce text messages between me and my prime minister – a disagreement Julia Gillard and I had over how we should vote in the United Nations between Israel and Lebanon over responsibility for an oil spill. There was no doubt the Israelis had caused the oil spill; on the other hand there was really no value for the General Assembly in this. It was a matter of international law. But I’d given a commitment that we would vote with Lebanon. Julia Gillard learnt about it and moved in to overrule the foreign minister, as prime ministers can do. And backwards and forwards it goes in our text messaging.

“Julia – motion on Lebanon oil spill raises no Palestinian or Israel security issues. In that context I gave commitment to Lebanon. Need only abstain. If oppose we will be with half a dozen only. Terrible signal to the Arab world and with other votes to Arab background voters. Can you take a moment to reconsider this?”

 She replied: “In an EAS session (East Asia Summit). Re resolution – Australia has always voted against it. No reason has been given me to change. We do need to discuss Middle East issues – had a good chat with Obama. Will ensure we do when I get back. Julia.”

 “Julia – not so simple. I as foreign minister, gave my word etc etc.”

 “Bob – still in EAS. My jurisdiction on UN resolutions isn’t confined to ones on Palestine and Israel. Any shift of significance needs to be checked with me. And our only refuge on ones …” blah blah blah.

 “Julia but one…” and so on.

Now it is unethical to reproduce this. But there are several outweighing considerations. One is the public’s right to know. I think the public has a right to know this and not only when the next Snowden or Manning, courtesy of lax American security, decides to sling all our secrets into the air and watch as The Guardian and other sources pick them up and print them. Second, that exchange does not put Julia in a bad light. It’s just that she’s got a different view from a foreign minister and she’s expressing it as forcefully as I expressed a contrary view. Nobody comes out of it badly. Third, I don’t think I could explain to readers the ebb and flow of an argument between me as minister and the prime minister I’m serving without reproducing the gritty detail of that exchange. There’s nothing embarrassing in that for her, she’s just got a different view.

A diary, of necessity, has an immediacy with a rough and ready quality to it. It’s not a furnished, considered, crafted memoir. I’m presently reading US Defence Secretary Robert Gates’ memoir, under George W Bush and then under Barrack Obama. I’m finding it hard going. However, if it had been produced as a diary with immediate comments like – “Oh my God that cheap wine they serve at White House. I had half a glass too much. Now I wake up with a god damn hangover and I’m off to that meeting on X or Y today at the Pentagon.” It would have brought it alive for me, and for every reader. It would have had the quotidian detail, the granular detail, of a life that immerses us in a diary.

Think of Alan Clark’s diary. Or the diary of Chips Channon who was around at the time of Neville Chamberlain. He talked about going off to that “great tawny male paradise” the House of Commons. On 3 September 1939, with the outbreak of war, his first thought was his wardrobe. He looked at the cupboard and recorded, “I have 55 suits. Even with the most stringent clothes rationing this should see me through war.”  His diary is loaded with personality.

The day-to-day immediacy, the details of daily life, interest us because we’re all human. The personalisations are what bring a diary alive. So I prefer the diary form. I love history, as I’m sure everyone here loves history, and I think having been involved in the process, one has an obligation to share it with the Australians of the future, with the historians of the future.

I knew I was going to be foreign minister for eighteen months. I wanted, in that time, not to build new architecture since there’s enough architecture with APAC and the G20 and the East Asia Summit and the European plus the East Asia Summit and ASEAN plus one, plus the UN plus other multi-lateral for a and the the Pacific Island forum. Half the world is in the air at any one time attending meetings, certainly in South East Asia.

I wanted to win, if possible, that ballot for the Security Council seat but by projecting Australia’s personality. I was somewhat pessimistic as to whether we’d get there. I wanted to elevate our relations with South East Asia and I wanted to rectify relations with China, without appearing ruffled and certainly without appearing panicky. I thought that in late 2011 we’d probably got the emphasis in our relations with China a little wrong.

One surprising conclusion I’ll share with you: the relevance of the Commonwealth of Nations. In the 1980s when the Cold War was roaring ahead, a few people formed the notion of a community of democracies. With any UN forum, Australia and its Western democracies could be sitting with representatives of assorted police states and Marxist-Leninist dictatorships next to a military dictatorship. The UN is not a gathering of nations with hearts which beat as one. An international organisation that only democracies could belong to was a vision for a moment.

As I chaired a meeting of the 55 or so Commonwealth nations in London, we agreed on a charter of the Commonwealth. By signing up to this charter we were entrenching a practice as written by Commonwealth rules. All members would need to be a democracy, to respect certain principles otherwise they would be excluded. It occurred to me that suddenly we had made the very organisation we used to talk about in the 1980s. A community of democracies. One with other values as well. No nation is on the periphery, no nation is at the centre. Half the Commonwealth nations are small powers. Think of the Caribbean – small island developing states. This is a forum, the only forum, which grants such countries such a level of respect. The foreign minister for the Solomon Islands gets round his electorate in a canoe with a outboard motor. The foreign minister of Seychelles, a former Olympic swimmer called Jean-Paul Adam, swims the ocean towing his three-year-old daughter with him. I said, “Aren’t you afraid of sharks?” “Yes,” he said “There have been some bull shark attacks. However, they’ve only gone for tourists.”

This is a very good forum for us to participate in; and one where Australia could have had the honour of being placed in the chair. One where Australia can speak with quite a bit of authority. Take the Seychelles for example. We’ve delivered for them on anti-piracy activities. When one ship went missing, they lost a third of their year’s supply of fuel. Australia has a lead role in fighting piracy in the Indian Ocean around the Horn of Africa and the Solomon Islands. John Howard deserves enormous credit for his intervention that rescued the Solomon Islands from wholesale civil war, The RAMSI Intervention. The Commonwealth as a community of democracy is a very valid forum.

Another notion arose from my experience dealing with decision making policy on Sri Lanka. There is no clash between human rights and protecting our national interest. On the two occasions I spoke to the Sri Lankan leadership, I was able to raise a full list of our human rights concerns, seeking assurances on the process of reconciliation after their tragic civil war and that they would faithfully implement something they signed up to – which is the reconciliation document, a bench mark for achieving a reconciliation of the competing forces. Sri Lanka has had 35 years of civil war. America had a four year civil war and took over 100 years to patch up the damage. Sri Lanka had a civil war where had the Tamal Tigers succeeded they may would have carved out, in the north of the country, a state that could quite conceivably have resembled Pol Pot’s murderous regime in Cambodia.

Tamil Tigers introduced suicide bombing. The world ignored this tragic civil war. I’ve had meeting with the Tamil community in Australia and meetings with Labor MPs to reflect the influence of Tamil voters in their electorates. While I respect what they tell me, the Tamil narrative isn’t the only one. There’s another narrative about this civil war. Mahinda Rajapaksa, speaking for a Sinhalese majority, has won two elections. He gained support even from conservatives because there is peace at the end of the civil war.

The Canadians pressed me hard over Sri Lanka late last year and the CHOGM meeting to be held there. They were responding to a big Tamil presence in their electorates. But I told the Canadian foreign minister that we could do more by engaging with the Rajapaksa Government, by supporting the holding of CHOGM in Sri Lanka, while continuing to press them on human rights. If we had walked out on CHOGM – for example, sent only a minister and not our prime minister, or attempted to boycott it all together – we would simply isolate them and encourage isolationist instincts.

We’ve got real interests in Sri Lanka. One is in seeing that we get the cooperation of their authorities in stopping the flow of irregular migration out of its ports. That’s a legitimate interest. We don’t want more deaths at sea, and we don’t want a growth in people smuggling activities. We don’t want to handle more cases on Christmas Island. I wanted to be able to pick up the phone to the Sri Lankan foreign minister and press this case – stop those boats, and deal with us through regular immigration.

I tried to elevate our relations with South East Asia. I’ll never forget sitting down with Myanmar President Thein Sein and telling him that Australia was not simply suspending our sanctions but lifting our sanctions. On one of the happiest days of my life, I went from Yangon out into the Delta country towards Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s electorate. It is an area of very small farms and I was going there to inspect some Australia aid projects. We are equipping the country schools and training the school teachers.

One measure of Myanmar’s poverty is that only half the population will complete primary school. Just absorb that. If half the population doesn’t complete primary school, they’re barely able to read messages on health or on improving farm productivity or participating in the political process. I thought it was a marvellous advertisement for Australia that we were setting up these schools. I went into one school see these little kids in their blue and white uniforms, and their hair plastered down because of the foreign visitor. They were told to be on their best behaviour. A group of parents was in attendance and one had a National League of Democracy T-shirt on. I said to our ambassador to let the parent know that I met Aung San Suu Kyi the day before. Back came the reply. The man had seen it on TV. So we lifted our sanctions, and we undertook to persuade the Europeans to do the same.

With the EU lifting sanctions, investment started to flow in from Europe to the mines and factories in Myanmar. The other intervention was to change the wording of the resolution on Myanmar carried on automatically every year in the UN General Assembly. It didn’t give them any credit for the journey they’d been on. Think about the role of ASEAN in this. When the president of Indonesia visited Myanmar, he said the role of the army was in the barracks. As a force for democracy in the region, there’s a lot of promise in that. The advice we had from ASEAN, on how we should deal with Myanmar, was basically correct. We opened up to Myanmar. I was thrilled when the foreign minister of Myanmar said on a visit to Australia, and he meant it, that his country viewed Australians as Asians; he saw us as part of the community of the region.

Imagine the ASEAN world in 20 years time – if things go right and the ASEAN nations continue on this trajectory of economic growth, expanded middle class and improved social indicators, with the increase in the proportion of girls who get to finish school, girls that go to university, and the percentage of the population getting post school degrees. There is tremendous progress in all these countries and if they continue well there’s a guarantee virtually of Australian security and Australian prosperity.

This is a region of resilient nations enjoying economic prosperity and moving to first world living standards, getting middle income status and approaching the standard of Singapore or Taiwan or South Korea. Their supermarkets are stock full of Australian produce and Australian goods; flights going into these capitals are full of Australians going there to work as engineers, as town planners, environmental advisors and so on. They’re buying Australian services. Our universities are full of their students, their universities are full of Australian students; this is a vision of an Australia that is integrated with South East Asia, with obvious implications for our prosperity and our security.

What could go wrong? Well, first of all, governance. A coup in Thailand. A country that it economically promising with a terrific work ethic, efficient industries, a very favourable country for foreign investment. There are Thai companies hoping to achieve multi-national status by investment in Australia, by buying Australian assets – in power, wind farms, in food, financial services. It is all very exciting but possibly failing because opposition parties in Thailand have failed to accept the results of elections and do what happens in mature democracies when you lose. I know what that’s like and how traumatic that is. But, if you lose, you just go out and plan for a day when you’ll put together a strategy to get yourself back.

In these countries of South East Asia, often governance is a polite word for corruption. Systemic and large scale corruption. A candidate for the presidency of Indonesia shared with me his concerns about corruption as a tax, an indirect tax, on every level of economic activity throughout Indonesia. In Vietnam, it’s the reform process. Were Vietnam to open up its economy as China did and reform its politics it would be a dynamo. Think of that country and a people that has defeated France, the United States and China in wars. A population of around 100 million.

Outside Ho Chi Minh City I visited a university campus where every student I spoke to was doing something like business communications or marketing. I asked a group of them how this was in a Marxist-Leninist system. It didn’t worry them – they just needed a marketing degree with hopes of going on to Princeton. We pressed human rights cases with them, famous cases that the Vietnamese community in Australia put to me. It’s very interesting when a blogger can get more readers than any official newspaper in the country so there’s an energy there waiting to be unleashed. It could be one of the riveting stories out of the region.

With Indonesia, one of our goals has got to be to nurture a block of opinion, mass opinion in Indonesia, that is well-disposed towards Australia. We don’t figure as largely with Indonesia as they figure with us. It’s our biggest embassy, our biggest aid program but they look elsewhere for the outlines of foreign policy based on the online movement in relations to their north, looking towards the Indian Ocean and so on. It would be a mistake if we allowed intelligence and security matters to let us lose sight of other interests in our relationship, matters such as continued police cooperation, counter-terrorism, madrassas that provide immoderate Islamic education. And getting Australian investment into the country despite the impediments of infrastructure and governance issues. As well as building trade.

Much of this will come as Indonesia achieves six per cent annual economic growth and builds a middle class. The stand off we’d had recently in relations ought to be quickly wrapped up in the same way the Americans resolved misunderstandings out of the Snowden revelations. At Parliament House in Canberra, I asked some Indonesian editors if they really thought that anyone in Australia wanted to partition the two Papuan provinces from the Indonesian republic. And there is some scepticism. I said it would not be in Australia’s interests. I assured them that regarding human rights issues, Australia and Indonesia have always been committed to dialogue about the two Papuan provinces. We have never seen it as a matter of sovereignty. That’s very important. Because there would be, in corners of Indonesian public opinion, people who would doubt that assurance and think that Australia – such as in regard to East Timor – would think that Australia is part of a Christian West that would seek to dismember an Islamic Republic. And then there’s a view of a wise public servant, Dennis Richardson, who said when we were talking about the lead up to an unusual meeting with the Americans: “Our interests aren’t always the same of those of a great power.”

I describe in my book sitting in the General Assembly in the UN in September 2012 when President Obama was speaking. He addressed the Assembly on 25 September and committed his speech as a memorial to ambassador Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador murdered in Benghazi. It was a time when there was a lot of attention on a Youtube video that mocked Islam. President Obama said that he found it repugnant. America is a religious nation, he said, and America found attacks on religion unpleasant. Yet the US did not ban blasphemy against its most sacred beliefs. It did this not because it supported hateful speech but because America’s founders understood that without such protections the capacity of each individual to express his or her views and practise their faith might be threatened.

It was a very elegant speech. As I sat there I thought that any Australian would subscribe to it. It was a reminder that common values between Australia and the US are very real.

I’ll just wrap up by quoting Kurt Campbell, former US Assistant Secretary of State. I told him in Washington that Julia Gillard was very buoyant about her visit to China. In Beijing, the Chinese committed themselves to guaranteeing annual meetings between their leadership and our leadership and we called this a strategic partnership. I asked if there would be any US reservations about that. His reply was that Australia should simply be the most desired girl on the block, and be courted by both of the US and China You don’t have to minimise or contain the opportunities of a robust relationship with China to appease Washington.

Kurt Campbell added that he believed Australia had a very successful foreign policy. And he meant over the decade. As a middle power we do very much punch above our weight.