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Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Page: 6979

Mr FRYDENBERG (Kooyong) (19:39): It was Winston Churchill, one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century, who said:

Their insatiable lust for power is only equalled by their incurable incompetence in exercising it.

Wind the clock forward 70 years and you could not find a more apt description of those opposite. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the field of foreign policy as exercised by our former Prime Minister and now Minister for Foreign Affairs, the member for Griffith. He lurches from one disaster to another, from one train wreck to the next. We had such high hopes for him, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat with postings to Beijing and Stockholm; a man who hounded Laurie Brereton in the shadow foreign affairs portfolio before deposing him with a knife as sharp as the one used by Wayne Swan.

During his term as foreign minister, like his term as Prime Minister, we have had one of the worst foreign policy records in living memory. Labor has ignored our region and Australia is worse off for it. It is worth recalling this litany of failures, country by country and issue by issue. I start with Japan, which was bypassed by the foreign minister on his first trip as Prime Minister. The quadrilateral security dialogue between India, the United States, Australia and Japan was abandoned. He promised to haul Japan before the International Court of Justice on whaling, just as the Japanese foreign minister was landing in Australia. In China, the foreign minister lectured them on human rights and then worried about the Manchurian candidate moniker starting to stick. So when he was sitting next to the Chinese ambassador in a TV interview in London he quickly changed the seating arrangements. How humiliating was that?

With Indonesia we had the Oceanic Viking stand-off, and now we have got the fiasco around live cattle exports. The problem is that we are high-handed in our relationship with Indonesia, rather than treating is as a partnership of equals. With Malaysia, the foreign minister has failed to lift a hand on the five-for-one people swap, damaging our bilateral relationship in the process. With East Timor, he allowed the Prime Minister to announce an agreement that never existed. With the South Pacific, it is absolutely disgraceful that the foreign minister has not visited there as foreign minister. We are the largest donor in the South Pacific. Could you imagine a CEO not going to visit the countries or the places where his money is being spent? With Fiji, we have been excluded from regional forums. With Papua New Guinea, when it came to Manus Island, we were nowhere to be seen; we do not have a foreign minister who is willing to visit.

With India, we have failed to sell uranium to them despite urging our partners in the Nuclear Suppliers Group—another 44 countries—to do so. With the United States, the foreign minister, when he was Prime Minister, was responsible for a well-publicised leak of a private conversation with George Bush. When it comes to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade we have a situation where, as Prime Minister, he vetoed the appointment of Hugh Borrowman as an ambassador because he allegedly did not possess the requisite foreign language skills. Many people suspected that it was to settle old scores.

Then there is the Asia-Pacific community, his own private idea. He was not happy with APEC, he was not happy with the ASEAN Regional Forum and he was not happy with an East Asia Summit. So he had to come up with the Asia-Pacific community by 2020. Marty Natalegawa, the then foreign minister of Indonesia, said it is 'another layer, an out-of-nowhere construction not in concert, not in synergy with what we have'. It came as a surprise to Ambassador Woolcott, who was approached to lead this initiative just two hours before the Prime Minister announced it. Our UN Security Council bid has diverted key resources away from our 90-odd missions overseas, and the Governor-General was sent on a very unusual seven-nation tour of Africa. The problem is we have a Prime Minister who is not interested in foreign affairs and we have a Minister for Foreign Affairs who is not talking to the Prime Minister. In the member for Griffith's maiden speech, he said:

Politics is about power. It is about the power of the state.

Well, he has visited over 40 countries, travelled 300,000 miles and has very little to show for it. Henry Kissinger said:

If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

Unfortunately, this reflects Australian foreign policy. (Time expired)