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	This book tells a small part of a long and still-unfinished story: how the people of Australia, this vast continent on the edge of the Asian landmass, are slowly coming to terms with the implications of their place in the world. The story has been unfolding since a British colony was established at Port Jackson more than two hundred years ago, in part to preserve from French challenge Britain's access to the wealth of Asian trade. It has shaped our sense of threat and opportunity ever since. And it has been the dominant theme of our foreign policy since we came to the slow recognition that our interests and those of Britain could diverge. What follows is partly a personal story--an account of my own involvement with Australia's external relations during the time I was prime minister--and partly some reflections, on Australia, its place in the world and the future of our region. It is not so much a record of what my colleagues and I did as why we did it. I was elected to succeed Bob Hawke as Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party on 19 December 1991. In politics you seldom have the luxury of choosing your timing and, as is well known, this was not mine. But I could hardly have become Prime Minister of Australia at a more interesting moment. At the end of 1991 I believed we were living through one of the pivotal periods of modern history. The world was entering an era that was different in form, not just in degree, from anything we had known before. The year had begun with Operation Desert Storm, the war in the Gulf. It was to end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The broad multinational coalition brought together in response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait had been hailed as the beginning of a new, more cooperative approach to international relations. The divisions of the Cold War were to be replaced by a 'New World Order', based on a revitalised United Nations and cooperation between the great powers. But even by year's end differences were emerging within the Gulf coalition, and it was clear it did not offer a sustainable model for the future. The phrase 'New World Order' had come to mean more to the world's right-wing conspiracy theorists than to those who were trying to understand what was happening to the international system. To describe the world, politicians and their speech-writers had to fall back on terms such as 'the post-Cold War world'. This only demonstrated that it was still much easier to describe our lives in terms of what had passed rather than what was to come. We were living in what seemed, in so many ways, to be a 'post' world--post-Cold War, post-modern, post- industrial ... Our language reflected our uncertainty about what was coming next. Since the end of the Second World War we had inhabited a bipolar world. We had defined our countries and ourselves as of the East or the West, or, if we were from the newly independent Third World, we hovered somewhere along a spectrum between them. The Cold War had been, on both sides, ideological as well as geo-strategic; that is, it had been rooted in a struggle for ideas. As Australian political history--and not least the history of the Australian Labor Party--attested, the struggle had domestic as well as international ramifications. It had been instrumental in maintaining the conservative majority in the Australian Federal Parliament for thirty long years. And in theory (at least on the Soviet side), and at various periods in practice, too, the Cold War was seen by those engaged in it as a Manichean battle which could be won only by the complete victory of one side and the annihilation of the other. Or even, as we sometimes feared in our nightmares, the annihilation of us all. Yet for a combination of wholly unexpected reasons (expected least of all by the two main protagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union), we were blessed by an epiphany at the end of a century that had given us few reasons to expect one. Thanks to a combination of good luck and good judgement by some of the key figures involved, in a miraculous few years the Cold War ended, and the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble. Europe was no longer divided, and the Soviet Union disappeared from the map. Of course, powerful underlying forces like technology, economic strength and the power of ideas shaped this outcome. But the form and the manner in which the Cold War ended owed much to particular individuals: Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw that the system he had inherited had reached a dead end and who had the courage to face it; Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who both knew when to take yes for an answer; Helmut Kohl, who acted with vision and expedition to reunite Germany against the odds and all manner of cautious advice; and Boris Yeltsin, who stood on the tanks outside the Moscow White House and stared down the putschists. The world was utterly changed. It wasn't just the structures of the preceding fifty years that were toppling in 1991. At the very core of the international system, subterranean rumblings foreshadowed more profound change. With the constraints of the Cold War gone, the foundations of the nation-state, which had formed the basis of the international system for more than 150 years, were looking much less immutable. This was not to say that the state was suddenly irrelevant, or that national governments were about to disappear, or that quite old-fashioned (indeed, prehistoric) concepts of what power rested upon--wealth, technology, and armed force, and the willingness to use it--were about to be swept away. But, like termites, the twin forces of globalisation and the information revolution were gnawing away at the struts and joists that had forever separated our national house from the world around it. Economic globalisation had been transforming the world since the 1980s. An Australian approach to it had been one of the principal concerns of my time as Australian treasurer. International statistics measuring international trade and investment revealed just how comprehensively and quickly the transformation was taking place. Globally, direct investment abroad rose from around $US50 billion in 1983 to $US150 billion in 1992. Between 1965 and 1990 the percentage of world output going to exports doubled. One result was that the share of world trade in the global economy rose three times as fast between 1985 and 1994 as in the preceding ten years. And more than one-third of that trade was conducted by firms trading with themselves. In fact, the bulk of all goods traded internationally were parts and components for assembly by an estimated 40,000 transnational companies producing goods across national borders. The top one hundred of these companies had global assets worth approximately $US3.4 trillion. Developing countries had been major beneficiaries of globalisation and, as a result, they were becoming much more central to global trade. By 1991 it was already clear that the negotiations that had been under way since 1986 on the future of international trade (the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations so-called, because that was where they had been launched) could no longer be settled in quiet back-room discussions between the Americans, the Europeans and the Japanese. The developing economies were increasingly vital participants in the global economy and they had to be involved. This was particularly important to us in Australia. The Asian economies had grasped the importance of globalisation earlier than most and had been opening up their economies to participate in it. The result had been the extraordinary surge of growth known as 'the East Asian miracle', with the economies of some of Australia's neighbours growing year by year at eight and nine per cent and higher. For the first time in our history, Australia was situated within the fastest growing region of the world. Non-economic issues were also forcing the pace of globalisation and changing the international agenda. Environmental pollution, for example, often had causes and effects that spread well beyond national boundaries and could not be addressed, let alone fixed, by national governments. Overlaying globalisation was the information revolution. I was sure we were at the point with the information revolution we had been at 150 years earlier with the industrial revolution. We were on the verge of changes that would not only transform our economies but our lives as well. Personal computers and telecommunications technologies were pulling distance in at a meteoric pace. In 1991 the World Wide Web had just been created, and even among the technological elite few people comprehended its eventual impact. But it was clear that for the first time in human history we were moving into a world that was information-rich, information-drenched. This had all sorts of consequences for the way our societies and economies were organised and governed, and the way countries dealt with one another. The combined pressures of globalisation and information were coming at us like a wall of water. We could understand it and be prepared for it, or it could wash over us, leaving us at a standstill as it carried others around us to greater wealth and prosperity. This was the world in December 1991. Some of these developments were obvious; some we had already made long preparations for; others were cloudy. But it was clear as day that in combination they were determining Australia's future. The question on my mind was how we should harness their power and ride the wave. In the usual way we think of it, foreign policy is a remarkably recent development in Australia. The country's first real effort to mark out an international position of its own came at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference which ended the First World War. The results were decidedly mixed. Prime Minister Billy Hughes lobbied successfully to secure Australian control over New Guinea but also to preserve the White Australia Policy. (He argued against a Japanese proposal that the Covenant of the new League of Nations should include an assertion that racial equality was a condition of world peace on the grounds that such a sentiment might undermine Australia's immigration policy.) We had no fully functioning external affairs department until 1935. Arguably, we had no status in international affairs until 1931, when the Statute of Westminster gave autonomy to the whiter parts of the British Empire--Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. But even then Australia was well behind the other dominions in carving out a place for itself in the world. The conservative Lyons administration was actually affronted by Whitehall seeking to kick us out of the nest. Our first independent representative overseas was R.G. Casey, sent to Washington as Australian Minister in 1940. We didn't ratify the Statute of Westminster until late in 1942. We were not going to be tricked into autonomy. Australia's lack of interest in--even hostility to--the idea of an independent foreign policy was shared in different ways on the right and left of the political spectrum. For the conservative parties, it reflected a fervent wish to remain under the wing of imperial protection and a deeply ingrained fear of what would happen to us--socially and culturally, as well as economically and strategically--if we dared strike out on our own. In 1937 Robert Menzies could explain to Parliament the delay in ratifying the Statute of Westminster by saying: 'I know that quite a number of responsible people are troubled about the proposal to adopt the Statute of Westminster for the reason that they feel it may give some support to the idea of separatism from Great Britain.' On Labor's side, the caution about Australia's role in the world stemmed more from the deep isolationism into which the party sank after the First World War. Labor saw our international involvements in Belgium, in France, and at Gallipoli as the events which snuffed out the flame of Australia's rising nationalism: the movement to Federation, the ethos of equality, the formation of unions and, in the 1890s, the creation of the Labor Party itself. This mix of caution from both sides of politics, coupled with the malign role of White Australia, impeded our capacity to think of ourselves as ourselves and of our place in the world around us. As Kim Beazley Snr. wrote perceptively in 1966: 'The White Australia Policy never did Australia as much harm in the thinking of foreigners as it did in keeping Australia small, self-centred and without a program for Asia.' The very few far-sighted politicians, academics and officials who saw a different future for Australia were drowned out by the conservatism and jingoism that followed the First World War and the incantations that extolled the monoculture. The Second World War was a watershed for Australia. After the fall of the British bastion of Singapore it was impossible to doubt that Australia had vital interests in the world--including our national survival--that did not always coincide with Great Britain's. The Labor Prime Minister of the time, John Curtin, turned to the United States for assistance 'free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom'. 'We know,' he said, '... that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on. We are therefore determined that Australia shall not go ...' Here began our first serious engagement with Asia. We were frogmarched by history to find our security in the region. After the war, our neighbours were no longer European colonial powers but independent and assertive national governments. Now we had to deal with them directly, and not through London. The Labor Government's early support for the Indonesian revolution in 1947 set the stage for a new sort of Australian engagement with the region: our effective resignation from the Colonial Club. Labor knew that if our interests were to be protected we had to develop our own foreign policy, our own institutions, our own approaches. In large measure, because of the war, the collective voice of those Australians who saw our future in this region became louder and more assertive. Journalists like Peter Hastings and Denis Warner, academics like W. Macmahon Ball and Heinz Arndt, and diplomats like Tom Critchley, Alf Parsons and Richard Woolcott brought Asia more forcefully to the attention of the Australian Government and its people. So in 1991, Australian foreign policy, formally at least, was less than fifty years old. As it was so critical to what we could become, the question in my head was how might a prime minister shape it and give it force and direction. The Prime Minister of Australia has no job description. The Constitution doesn't even mention the position. The job can be performed in ways as different as the people who occupy it. That is especially true of the position's external dimensions. Apart from turning up to shake hands with visitors and attending a couple of more-or-less compulsory international meetings, there is nothing the prime minister must do in the area of foreign policy. Some have done little more. No prime minister's day is long enough to accommodate all the things that others are urging to fill it. Choices about how much time to spend on one issue or another, whether to see one visitor rather than another, to attend one function and not another are among the most important decisions any prime minister has to take. And the choices have to be taken deliberately. Otherwise the agenda for the whole government ends up being shaped by accident, or the relentless burden of precedent, not by design. To some extent, like any job, it responds to the events of the time. James Scullin had to deal with the Depression, John Curtin with the Second World War. Responding to crises--handling what lands on your plate--is an important responsibility of any prime minister. But so, too, is setting the agenda: knowing why you want the job, knowing what to do with it. Above all, it is imagining something better and fashioning the policies to get there. The international 'system'--the way governments and other international entities react with each other and shape the way the world operates--is almost incomprehensibly complex. Any system that depends on national interests and human psychology has to be. As a result, international events rarely lend themselves to careful pre-planning. Decisions frequently have to be taken at short notice and with incomplete data. As prime minister, the information you are working with is almost always thinnest at the beginning of any crisis than later, but it is the initial responses which often determine the outcome. That is why it is so singularly important for any prime minister to bring to the job a framework or view of the world within which to provide context to often seemingly random developments. Without such a framework, foreign policy becomes a series of ad hoc reactions to external events, an approach that leaves the country hostage to luck or misadventure. With external policy, all of my predecessors had done the job in individual ways. Many had been very successful. Gough Whitlam, in particular, had given new hope and international standing to Australian foreign policy. His intelligence and energy contrasted with the 'All the way with LBJ' banalities of Harold Holt and the national torpor induced by Billy McMahon and Menzies before him. With recognition of China and his emphasis on Australia's role in our region, he also bequeathed the country a new bipartisanship in foreign policy which had existed with odd fluctuations ever since. Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke each had a continuing and creative interest in foreign affairs. Notwithstanding Bob's interest in Australia's engagement with Asia, especially China, and his proposal for establishing the economic and trade body APEC, each of them had spent a large amount of their time on global issues, particularly on Southern Africa, where they worked through the Commonwealth on both Zimbabwe's independence and the end of apartheid in South Africa. Bob had a long-standing and deep personal interest in the Middle East as well. As prime minister, I was not interested in being, as both Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser had in essence been, my own foreign minister. Nor did I have any interest in the ceremonial or symbolic aspects of the job. I could not have cared less if I never attended a diplomatic banquet or walked to a fanfare of trumpets down a red carpet or inspected an honour guard. I certainly did not want to spend my time engaged in exchanges of views with other leaders for which officials had carefully worked out the talking points in advance and where the responses were scripted. I was determined to focus on those things that only a prime minister could do. I often described the job of politics in Australia as being in 'the change business'. There seems to me no other reason to be in the service of the public. If the only work to be done is to preside over the status quo, bureaucrats, I am sure, would do a much better job of it. The Australian version of the Westminster system of government sets the broad structures of government--a Cabinet drawn from the party or coalition which commands a majority in the House of Representatives, and so on. But the precise operations of each government differ according to its own internal dynamics. I thought the core dynamics for Labor when I became prime minister were the quality and experience of our ministers. They needed no prime ministerial micro-management of their portfolios. The team we had working on our external policies was particularly strong, with Gareth Evans in Foreign Affairs, Robert Ray in Defence, John Kerin, Peter Cook and Bob McMullan in Trade, and Gordon Bilney on aid and Pacific affairs. The country was exceptionally fortunate to have in Gareth Evans an outstanding foreign minister, and I had no wish to duplicate his work or to intrude into the subtle webs he had put together. I greatly admired Gareth's commitment, courage, energy, idealism and ideas. But being different people, we approached international issues in different ways. Gareth is a lawyer, an internationalist and very much the idealist. I have a more sceptical, intuitive and power-based view of the international system. History, the dynamics of power, and an understanding of the personalities informed my view of events, while I think Gareth, very conscious of these things too, placed more weight on argumentative symmetry and the protocols by which international events and responses were calibrated and weighted. Any differences we had were more evident at the beginning of our working relationship than at the end. By then we had grown familiar with each other and had shaped each other's views as well. Contrary, perhaps, to many views, we are particularly good listeners, especially of one another. Throughout our entire time in government, our sometimes different approaches to the world were contained within a very similar view of Australia's interests, and an identical commitment to Australia's position in the world. The formal decision-making body for foreign policy, as for all government policy, was Cabinet. For reasons of security, the most sensitive defence, foreign policy and intelligence issues were handled through the limited-membership Security Committee. But because of the fluid and fast-moving nature of most international events (and the inevitable frequent absence overseas of the foreign minister and trade minister), informal discussions between the relevant ministers, directly, on the telephone, or through our staff, were the most important means of coordination. Communication between offices was a daily, even hourly, process, especially when Parliament was sitting. Within my office I had a senior adviser on international relations. When I became prime minister, I asked Dr Ashton Calvert to take this job. Ashton was an outstanding diplomat and expert on Japan whose hard-headed, take-no-prisoner approach to international affairs I had admired on earlier visits to Tokyo. When Ashton went to Tokyo as our ambassador, he was succeeded in 1993 by Allan Gyngell, another former diplomat who had been heading the important International Division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Allan had a great sense of structure to his thinking about foreign relations and a particularly sure touch to issues-management. While somewhat different, Calvert and Gyngell shared common views with me about how Australia should set itself up in the region and how and where we should point it over the long haul. The job of the senior adviser on international affairs in the office was a coordinating and advising one. The adviser managed the voluminous flow of paper coming into the office--foreign affairs telegrams, raw and assessed intelligence reports, Cabinet papers and submissions from the public service, official and unofficial correspondence under the weight of which any prime minister would otherwise drown. He decided what required my personal attention and what did not. He was a sounding board for me about international issues and could act as a conduit for other ministers and ministerial offices. Next to the foreign minister, the adviser's job is, I believe, the second most important in the Australian foreign policy firmament. Free of the administrative burden which the secretaryship of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has, the adviser's job is principally about policy. But unlike most policy jobs, it carries with it the live conduit of power. Like all ministers, my office and I drew on, and were supported by, the great resource of the Australian public service. In the area of external policy this meant the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the senior defence force and civilian officers in the Department of Defence, and the Prime Minister's department, especially its International Division. In addition to the policy advice and briefing coming from their government departments, the prime minister and his colleagues also have access to raw and assessed intelligence from the Australian intelligence agencies. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service collected human intelligence--what most people think of as 'spying'--and the Defence Signals Directorate collected signals and electronic intelligence, largely by technical means. This raw intelligence was then assessed, along with diplomatic reports coming in from our overseas posts and news reports, by the Office of National Assessments (ONA), Australia's main analytical intelligence organisation. ONA's assessments were often of a high quality, and as the subsequent inadvertent publication of some views of South-Pacific developments showed, they were written in a decidedly non-bureaucratic manner. Intelligence is more abundant in the information age. The days are long gone when the inner workings of the Kremlin were a state secret and our knowledge of any scrap of information could add hugely to our ability to make accurate judgements about the behaviour of such countries. Governments still have secrets, of course, but the relative size of the closed world--and its relative importance--is shrinking by the day, part of a fundamental change in the role of government in a global age. In the area of defence, intelligence is an essential force-multiplier for a country as small as Australia. But I was less convinced of the value of political and economic intelligence. Sometimes intelligence could confirm an approach or point in new directions, but on too many issues it could be characterised as no more than modestly useful. It is almost always, and perhaps inevitably, weakest on the subject of the intentions of others. I was always more interested in ideas than in data. It is always ideas that are in shortest supply. For that reason, I was a more sceptical and disinterested consumer of secret intelligence than some other prime ministers have been. Very sceptical, in fact. It is easy to be seduced by documents stamped with code-words and handled through special channels, and easy to forget to ask, 'Yes, but does it matter?' For this reason, I did not usually see, or want to see, unassessed intelligence but preferred it properly analysed and placed in the context of what we knew from all sources. However professional our intelligence agencies, official advisers and diplomats may be, they can never do the whole job for a country. I knew from long experience that political leaders could do things which no official, however skilled and imaginative, could do. Politicians shape the world. They have to be open to the views of their officials and academics and business interests, and must be aware of the other ideas flowing around in the community. But in the end they alone carry the authority of the democratic contest, the authority that gives them the opportunity and the responsibility to change the way the country functions and to determine for it a place in the world. I brought with me to the prime ministership three particular convictions about Australia's place in the world, and these informed my actions in the following years. The first was that Australia's economic success at home was heavily dependent upon what we did, and how we related externally; the second, that our future lay comprehensively in Asia; and the third, that the times gave Australia an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility to help shape the world and the region around us. My first conviction had been reinforced by my eight years' experience as treasurer. The daily business of contending with the countless international influences on the Australian economy--a middle-sized industrial economy--brought home to me just how powerful were the forces at work in a globalised world and how futile it was for a country of Australia's size to pretend we could hold the pressures of a more integrated world at bay. I believed that openness to the world was the only way that Australia could optimise its creative potential and give our people the growth, jobs, and the satisfying lives they deserved. We had tried the other, completely opposite approach through most of the century and it did not work. The old trade- off, brought to its apogee by the Country Party under John McEwan, involved relying on our efficient mining and agricultural sectors to prop up and subsidise a manufacturing sector which, because of protection from competition by high tariffs, became lethargic and lacked serious ambitions beyond our shores. The policy depended on the national good fortune of our inheritance of an abundant continent. But by the mid-1980s, the terms of trade--that is, the prices we broadly received for the things we produced, compared with the prices we paid for the things we bought--had turned well against us, as indeed they did against all commodity suppliers. In just two years, from March 1985 to March 1987, the terms of trade fell by 14 per cent. As the full implications of the globalised economy made themselves felt, the old ways had become unsustainable. My references at that time to Australia being at risk of becoming a banana republic reflected my deep concern and foreboding about this inexorable trend. Australia had a rich legacy of innovation and pure scientific research on which to draw, and services that could compete with any in the world. But I always believed that our industry, including our services industry, would only develop the skills it needed to survive in tough international competition if it also faced competition at home. Labor's national ambition for Australia was a world-competitive economy underpinning an egalitarian and inclusive society. So from 1983 onwards, the Labor Government began the painful but necessary task of opening up the Australian economy. We let the Australian dollar find its true competitive level by floating it. We removed exchange controls, freed the domestic financial sector and opened up the financial sector to international competition; we deregulated our aviation and telecommunications industries, established a more efficient national competition policy, privatised the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas and embarked on the huge task of breaking down the tariff wall. I was sure in 1991 that we had to maintain this direction. Not to do so would have eroded the prosperity, and eventually the security, of future generations of Australians. I am just as sure of it now. My experience as treasurer had given me a strong sense of the central role of economics in foreign policy, a role I believed would grow dramatically now the shackles of the Cold War had been removed. One of the most significant administrative changes made by the Labor Government had been the amalgamation in 1987 of the competing bureaucratic empires of Foreign Affairs and Trade into one new department. This had strengthened the link between our political and economic interests and made our diplomats much more attuned to economic and commercial interests, but I thought still more should be done. I could also see that almost every issue Australia would have to contend with in coming years now had an international dimension. Wherever you looked, this was evident. Employment growth and the sorts of industries we created, social policy and pensions, the future of culture and popular entertainment, our relations with indigenous Australians, even the future of the sports we played and watched were all increasingly tied up with and shaped by--and in some cases determined by--what happened abroad. Foreign policy had become a sinew of domestic policy rather than the outrider it had mostly been in Australia. My second conviction was that Asia was where Australia's future substantially lay and that we needed to engage with it at a level and with an intensity we had never come close to doing in the past. This was not because we had not been interested in Asia before. But what was different in 1991 was that never before had all our national interests--political, economic, strategic, and cultural--coalesced so strongly in the one place as they did now. Once the Opposition abandoned the line that I had no interest in Asia and decided instead that I was obsessed with it, they regularly accused me of claiming to have invented Australia's relationship with Asia. That arrogant Paul Keating again. Of course, I did no such thing. I made it clear in almost every major speech I gave that Australia's relationship with Asia was long and, in large measure, honourable. From Hodogaya in Tokyo to Kranji in Singapore, the war cemeteries of the region alone are moving testament to that. In the baking heat of the Kanchanaburi cemetery near Hellfire Pass in Thailand I found the graves of three young Australian soldiers killed on the day I was born: 18 January 1944. Those fields of white crosses throughout Asia and the Pacific are a reminder of the role Australian forces played during the Second World War in turning back the tide of Japanese imperialism. Since then we have had a long record of involvement. Our contribution to Indonesia's independence struggle, the Korean War, the creation of the Colombo Plan, our early support for ASEAN, and our great partnership in the economic development of Japan and Korea were all things in which earlier generations of political leaders had been involved, some of them passionately, and of which we could be proud. It was not the whole story, however, and another, equally valid, history of Australia's relationship with the region around us would refer to the tenacious hold which fear of Asia held over the imagination of Australians. Australia's first view of Asia was heavily tied up with a sense of threat. The strategic threat was largely seen as coming from European colonial powers--the French first, then the Russians, and after the First World War, the Germans. Australia was an outpost of Europe and the threats to our security were the same as the threats to Britain. Canberra itself was established at its present location in part because it was out of the range of Russian gunboats. But reinforcing the strategic fear was the economic and cultural fear of the teeming hordes of Asians waiting just beyond our shores for the opportunity to undercut our wages, flood into our cities and countryside, and destroy our culture. This fear had its most obvious manifestation in the White Australia Policy, which was an affront to those who were excluded by it as it was to morality and to commonsense. It was a policy in which my party, the ALP, had been more culpable than any, although the ALP was more willing than any to finally abandon it. Following the very real threat from Japan during the Second World War and the subsequent transformations brought about by rising nationalism and decolonisation in Asia, a new set of fears emerged. Robert Menzies expressed them in 1946 when speaking about the departure of the European colonial powers: 'When we have, in this absurd frenzy, cleared our powerful friends out of the places that are vital to us, we in Australia will know all about isolation. I hope that day will never come.' Menzies was voicing the fear that we would one day wake up and find ourselves on our own without a great and powerful friend to preserve us from the yellow peril, or the red arrows thrusting downwards, or the simple terror of abandonment. Australia's struggle was never to avoid the 'foreign entanglements' the early American revolutionaries feared. On the contrary, we set about searching them out, roping them in, dragging them down, and clutching them tight. Throughout the 1950s and '60s the fear of Asia, or of something from Asia, remained the dominant undercurrent in Australian policy towards the region. Fear of a resurgent Japan, fear of an expansionary China, fear of a united Sino-Soviet challenge to our way of life, fear that unless we did our bit to support US policy in Vietnam we would be left alone. That was not all there was to Australian policy by any means, but it set the tone. Both strands of thought about Asia--positive and creative, negative and defensive--were at work in Australian policy and politics. But by 1991 we faced a new issue. For a decade East Asia had been the fastest-growing region on earth, with economic growth at twice the global average. What was happening in East Asia represented the greatest increment to economic growth in human history. Greater than the growth that came from the industrial revolution in Europe. Greater than the great surge of development that transformed the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the US economist David Hale noted, it took Britain and the United States fifty to sixty years to double per capita income in the early stages of the industrial revolution, but the countries of East Asia had been doing it every ten years. Two-thirds of Australia's exports were going there. And it was no longer just our traditional commodity exports. Between 1983 and 1993 Australian manufactured exports to Asia grew twice as fast as the traditional areas of trade, and exports of services grew even more rapidly. Frankly, it no longer mattered how effectively we had dealt with Asia in the past, but how we would deal with a new Asia--newer, at any rate, than at any time since the great decolonisation period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. And, the equally valid question for us--one we were unused to asking-- was how Asia would deal with Australia. I believed we started from the best possible position, that of having no historical or fundamental conflicts of interest with any country in the region. No point of aggravation, no enmities. A wide coalition of people, ranging from the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir, to the Australian opposition parties, accused me at various times of trying to turn Australia into an Asian nation. Behind all these charges seemed to lie the belief that Australia faced only one simple choice: to be 'Asian' or to be 'European'. Of course, I never saw Australia in those terms. For all that we had done and created here, we could only be the nation we had become: the Australian nation. A unique group of people; a derivative of no other country. In December 1993, after Dr Mahathir had claimed Australia could not be part of Asia because we were not (or more specifically, I suppose, I was not) behaving, in his view, as Asians, I said explicitly in a speech transmitted directly into Asia on Australia Television that: Claims that the Government is trying to turn Australia into an 'Asian country' are based on a misunderstanding of both my own approach and the direction of government policy. This is something I want to be understood very clearly because it is at the core of my view of Australia and of the Government's approach to relations with our neighbourhood. Put simply, Australia is not, and can never be, an 'Asian nation' any more than we can--or want to be--European or North American or African. We can only be Australian and can only relate to our friends and neighbours as Australian. I was to make this same point many times. 'Asia' is a very fluid term. It originated in the West. But however broadly you define it, I don't believe Australia makes the cut. How can we? We inhabit a continent. Aboriginal Australians have been here for at least 45,000 years, possibly millennia longer. The rest of us have come to Australia from more than 120 countries. However, that is a very different thing from asserting, as I believe we must, that Australia is a legitimate and central part of the region around us; that we are and have every right--and responsibility--to be a charter member of the region and its institutions. Whether you call this region Asia, or the West Pacific, or the East Asian Hemisphere, or the Asia-Pacific matters much less than our active participation in it, our legitimacy in being part of it. This right derives in part from geography, but not only that. It springs most particularly from the dense network of interests which bind Australia and our neighbours: the 60 per cent of our trade which goes to East Asia, the tens of thousands of Asian students who have studied in Australia, the long commitment-- bindings in our blood and theirs--Australia had made to the security of our neighbours during the Second World War, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency confrontation and the Five Power Defence Arrangements. My third conviction about Australia's place in the world was that the times gave us unprecedented opportunities and responsibilities to help shape the world and our region in ways that would help our long-term interests. In a world in flux, I felt countries like Australia had both the opportunity and the responsibility to help mould the emerging international system. Countries no less than individuals have to be alert to the opportunities they are offered and to know when to take them, when to move. I had been interested for most of my life in European political history, especially towards and at the turn of the twentieth century, and I had often thought about the reasons for the series of miscalculations and misreadings that led to the carnage of the prolonged European civil war and the tragedies of totalitarianism. None of it was preordained. Our century had been bloodied-- and 100,000 Australians had died--because statesmanship had failed. I thought that what political leaders did at the end of the twentieth century would lay the foundations for prosperity and security in the twenty-first century just as fatefully and inevitably as the actions of Europe's leaders had done a hundred years before. And I felt we had limited time in which to shape the new structures before nations and institutions settled only into ruts from which it would be difficult to dislodge them. Australia and the Australian prime minister could only be small elements in the reconstruction of the post-Cold War world. We could not determine the outcome, but we could influence it. For a middle-sized country we had a global view and a high reputation. We could punch above our weight, and often did. We had developed well the software of foreign policy. But I was sure that if I was to do anything with the opportunities I had been given, I did not have a second to lose. I did not know how long Labor would remain in office. I had been left with the prospect of winning a fifth consecutive election one year from a poll, and twenty-odd points behind. But however long our time was to be, I was determined to make the most of the opportunity and the responsibility. In December 1991 much of this lay in the future. I had immediate concerns. Within a couple of weeks I was to host the first visit to Australia in a quarter of a century by an American president. Decisions about the foreign policy agenda had to take on a very concrete dimension.