Australia has a responsibility to work with our region to ensure we are collectively well-placed to advance our common interests. It is unambiguously in our long term national interest to do so.

Comprehensive and active engagement with the Asia-Pacific region is one of the three pillars of the Rudd Government's foreign policy approach.

The Australian Labor Party in Government has both the history and the form in recognizing the importance of actively engaging with Asia to advance Australia's long-term national interests.

In the 1940s, a Labor Government under the leadership of Prime Minister Ben Chifley and Foreign Minister Doc Evatt supported Indonesian independence at the UN.

In the early 1970s it was Gough Whitlam, then Opposition Leader, who famously visited China when it was not quite so fashionable to do so. On coming to government, the Whitlam Government's decision to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing represented a real watershed in Australia's approach to Asia.

In 1973, the Whitlam Government became one of the earliest Western countries to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam after the signing of the Paris Peace Accord. I was delighted to mark the 35th anniversary of that significant event when I visited Vietnam earlier this month.

Under the Whitlam Government in 1974, Australia then became ASEAN's first dialogue partner.

In January 1989, Prime Minister Hawke first floated the idea of a regional forum for economic cooperation. A year of Australian diplomatic activity culminated in the holding of the first APEC Ministerial Meeting in Canberra in November of that year.

Prime Minister Paul Keating built on Australia's legacy as an architect of APEC by seeking to elevate APEC from a forum for foreign and economic ministers of the member economies to a forum for Presidents and Prime Ministers.

Keating personally lobbied key regional leaders, including U.S. Presidents Bush and Clinton. As a result of his efforts, the first APEC Leaders' Summit was hosted by U.S. President Clinton in Seattle in January 1993.

The scheduling of regular APEC Leaders' meetings provided opportunities not just to advance the work of APEC but to strengthen the personal and institutional linkages across the region through meetings between the leaders.

The Hawke/Keating Government also deployed Australia's diplomacy to promote regional peace and security in South East Asia.

The major diplomatic effort led by my predecessor Gareth Evans ultimately led to the very significant signing of a peace agreement in Cambodia, and the engagement of a UN peacekeeping force.

Gareth Evans also pushed for the creation of a regional forum for the discussion of strategic issues, based loosely on the ASEAN Post Ministerial Conference.

These Australian diplomatic efforts were also instrumental in the decision to form the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1994.

Evolving Regional Architecture

Shaping our evolving regional architecture in ways that suit the diverse nation states of our region is a challenging task, but it's a task which the Government believes Australia must be engaged in.

The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's initiative has started a conversation with our friends and neighbors about how the Asia Pacific regional architecture might evolve to meet future strategic, security, economic and political challenges and opportunities.

It's about what best regional architecture might prepare us for these emerging regional and global challenges.

The Asia Pacific community initiative encourages a debate about where we want to be in 2020, as world economic and political influence continues its inexorable shift to Asia.

The challenges we face are substantial:

o shifts in the distribution of strategic, economic and military influence within the international system;

o climate change and the increasing scarcity of natural resources including fresh water, arable land and energy supplies;

o the power of non-state actors, transnational criminal groups and terrorists;

o weapons proliferation, including the risk of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists;

o health pandemics, and their potentially catastrophic impact on human lives, trade flows and the movement of people; and

o poverty and inequalities in the distribution of wealth due to the varying rates of adaptation to economic globalization.

Australia and the region have a great opportunity to create something that can help us collectively to address these challenges.

The initiative centers on the idea of having a regional process that would for the first time:

o span the Asia- Pacific, and include the U.S., Japan, China, India, Indonesia and other States in the region;

o engage in the full spectrum of dialogue, cooperation and action on strategic, security, economic and political matters;

o encourage the development of a genuine and comprehensive sense of community, whose primary operating principle was cooperation.

This conversation doesn't diminish any of the existing regional bodies. On the contrary, they will continue to play their essential roles.

There could be a new piece of architecture, as ASEAN and APEC once were. Or it could evolve and emerge from and through the existing architecture, as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit have.

As currently configured, none of the current architecture is comprehensive in membership, scope or purpose.

India is not a part of APEC. The United States is not part of the East Asia Summit. We don't have a single piece of architecture where all of the key regional players can be in the same room at the same time talking about both economic and strategic matters.

As you know the Prime Minister has appointed a special envoy, Richard Woolcott, to engage with the region's political and intellectual leaders and pursue this conversation.

Conclusion

Australia's relations with ASEAN have never seen such potential.

While we are in good shape, there is much more we can and need to do.

The evolution and development of our regional architecture is vital for our region's future prosperity.

Helping to create the right structures for the future, or helping them emerge from existing ones, is not a process Australia can afford to watch from the sidelines.

This approach is in the best traditions of Australian Labor Governments: recognizing the importance of comprehensive engagement with the Asia Pacific and seeking to shape its outcomes, including through its regional architecture.

This article is based on excerpts of a speech delivered recently by Stephen Smith, Foreign Minister of Australia, at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

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