Despite Julia Gillard’s earlier admission that foreign affairs was not her forte, until now she has performed quite well at international forums, apparently winning the respect of world leaders, including Barack Obama.
However, she may have lost some of that admiration last week with her impatient call on the European Union leaders to get their act together and resolve the EU’s debt problems. Clearly she has little idea of the complexity of the financial and economic issues facing EU leaders and of the fundamental importance of this pioneering venture in regional integration.
Its importance is really less about economic integration, than about creating a continental zone of peace, based on commitment to human rights standards, in which there will be no repetition of the catastrophic wars that devastated Europe last century.
Obviously, a consensus is not easy. Ms Gillard has difficulties achieving a consensus of states and territories on economic and political issues herself, but it is an infinitely more complicated task to resolve the problems confronting the diverse 27 nations that make up the EU. They obviously involve cultural and political as well as economic differences.
Only 17 of the 27 states use the Euro and only about half belong to the Schengen agreement, which allows the free movement across borders of citizens of the participating states.
In the present economic circumstances to achieve a consensus acceptable to this culturally diverse community is far from easy but the EU is getting close to a solution.
The success of the EU is important to the world at large for both security and economic reasons, and therefore reaching an agreement acceptable to its diverse membership deserves our patience, understanding and encouragement.
Some Australian politicians have had a negative attitude towards European integration since the process began, based on fears that it would discriminate against our agricultural sector, and weaken our special links with the ‘Mother country’. These fears have been exaggerated and it is time our leaders exercised restraint, and took a more worldly view of a process that is important to both world security and to the achievement of universal humanitarian standards the world has set itself through human rights conventions. At this point, Julia Gillard’s view seems very unbalanced. On the one hand she is a carping critic of the EU; while on the other she is blindly loyal to US leaders, whose handling of the global economic crisis is less creative and constructive than that of the EU leadership.
In this context, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott did even worse this week. His joke about the ill-fated Italian cruise ship, Costa Concordia, was untimely and in such poor taste that he was forced to apologise, but it will not be forgotten in a country that has been a major source of Australian immigration.
More worrying was his announce- ment to force any boatloads of asylum seekers to return to Indonesia, a move that in the EU, which has an infinitely more serious asylum-seeker problem, would be considered a violation of human rights conventions.
This is an unacceptable proposal, which has come at a time when I sense that the Australian community is more prepared to help ease the problems faced by people fleeing the destabilisation in the Middle East due to our interventions, however well-intended.
James Dunn is an author with four decades of experience as a foreign affairs official and with UN agencies.
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