Rudd Pacific Plan Lost at Sea?

June 02, 2010

By Anthony Fensom

Unsurprisingly, Downer—Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister—dismissed the APc as ‘meaningless’ in line with the views of his former colleagues. Currently serving as the UN envoy for Cyprus, Downer told The Diplomat that the Asia-Pacific region could do without another institution.

‘I don’t think [the APc] is clearly defined and I don’t think it will work,’ he said. ‘I think it’s meaningless and simply meant for domestic consumption.’

‘There was great debate over who would belong to the East Asia Summit, and I don’t think the region is ready to engage in a new round of debate over who would be involved in some new institution, a premier institution, and over what it would do. I think they’re dealing with it as the region tends to deal with difficult diplomatic issues—they’re being polite about it, but I don’t think there’s any substantial support for it.’

But while the Government was not prepared to defend its own proposal, there was some support in academic circles.

Prof. Andrew MacIntyre, Dean of the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, described it as ‘a modestly good idea’ that was worth pursuing.

‘The difficulty we have at the moment is that we don’t have any framework that brings together all the countries that need to come together,’ he said. ‘There needs to be something that allows both India and the United States to both be in the conversation, and we haven’t got that.’

‘Whether you’re talking about an evolution of the East Asia Summit, or APEC, or the ASEAN Plus Three framework—it doesn’t matter too much which it is—but we need something that allows the full range of countries with major regional engagement to be together.’

Rudd’s point man on the APc has been veteran diplomat Richard Woolcott, who was credited by Rudd with having helped build support for APEC 20 years earlier under another Labor leader, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

Woolcott has reportedly followed a similar strategy to APEC’s formation of building support from ASEAN nations first before targeting the major powers. Yet after embarking on an 18 month-long tour of 21 regional capitals and racking up a reported $300,000 in travel and accommodation costs, the special envoy was able to report only support for ‘discussion’ about such a community.

In a May 2009 speech to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Rudd admitted that Woolcott had found ‘no appetite for additional institutions’ or meetings.

Woolcott, however, defended the need for a new community in a concept paper released prior to a December 2009 Sydney conference on the APc. He argued it was aimed at launching ‘a process of dialogue’ over a new body given the inadequacies of the existing groupings.

‘APEC’s mandate is economic, and its membership is so wide as to be unwieldy. The ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) has no leaders’-level meeting, can deal only with security matters and many believe it is too large and has made insufficient progress since its inception…ASEAN, APT (ASEAN Plus Three) and the EAS are each, to varying degrees, insufficiently representative of the Asia Pacific region to be said to constitute an APc. The EAS is most representative, and has a leaders’ meeting, but does not include some key countries,’ he wrote.