After Words by PJ Keating

Author:PJ Keating [After Words, PJ Keating]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 978-1-7426-9398-9
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

As Prime Minister, Paul Keating proposed and with Bill Clinton had built the APEC Leaders’ Meeting. Fifteen years on from its inaugural gathering, Australia was to host the 2007 meeting in Sydney under the stewardship of John Howard. To mark the occasion, the Evatt Foundation invited Paul Keating to sketch out the history of the APEC meeting and to address the contingency issues which the 2007 meeting might address. Paul Keating urges John Howard to lift his gaze and the focus of the meeting by putting strategic issues on the agenda, such as the armaments race taking place in North Asia. He also re-emphasises that Australia’s vital interests reside in the East Asian hemisphere and not in the Middle East, and urges Australia to be itself rather than a derivative power masquerading as someone else’s deputy.

SITTING DOWN TO A PRIVATE dinner one night in Tokyo as a guest of my Treasury counterpart, the Japanese Minister of Finance, Kiichi Miyazawa, in a moment of candour, asked me whether I thought the Chinese would attack Japan.

Taken aback by the question, and one put so seriously, I immediately replied, ‘No, I do not’.

To which Mr Miyazawa then said quizzically, ‘But why not?’

Both questions sent a political shiver through me, coming as they did from such an accomplished and worldly figure as Miyazawa.

What that conversation did for me was to underline something I had well known but had not concentrated upon: the unresolved issues between Japan and China flowing from their history during the Second World War and the period leading up to it.

Mr Miyazawa in the same conversation then asked me for a pen sketch of the personality of Mr Li Peng, the then Chinese Premier and other senior members of the Chinese politbureau.

Those remarks made it apparent to me that not only had the leadership of Japan’s government, the Liberal Democratic Party, no understanding of Chinese thinking, but worse than that, had never met Chinese leaders.

Japan’s imperial history and the history of the Cold War which followed it had kept the leadership of these two great nations apart to simmer in ignorance, resentment and mistrust.

It was the antipathies within this relationship that led me to conclude that something radical had to be done about the political architecture of north Asia and that that architecture had to also include the United States, Japan’s strategic guarantor.

This was the major dynamic which encouraged me, as Prime Minister, to propose a head of government meeting among the major powers of the Asia Pacific. An idea of an Australian Prime Minister who knew that Australia’s security would be put at risk if the countries of north Asia again resorted to military violence. And, not just Australia’s security—the region’s.

This was in 1992, fewer than three years after the Soviet Union had imploded, the Berlin Wall had come down and the Cold War had ended.

Twelve days after I had become Prime Minister, on 21 December 1991, I had the privilege of meeting and hosting a visit to Australia

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.