



MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS  HON ALEXANDER DOWNER, MP



TRANSCRIPTION: PROOF COPY E & OE



DATE: September 19 2005

TITLE: Doorstop - Washington DC.

MINISTER:  I may as well start off by telling you something about what I’m doing here, I  suppose. Then if you’ve got anything you want to raise with me.

I’m just here for a day. I’ve been seeing this morning Secretary Rumsfeld and also the Deputy  Secretary of State, Bob Zoellick. I had lunch with Jim Connaughton who is the President’s  special advisor on the environment, and this afternoon I’m going to go and see Stephen  Hadley, the national security advisor. Then, heading off to New York, and I have a series of  meetings including with Condi Rice in New York - she’s in New York at the moment.

We’ve obviously discussed a wide range of issues over lunch with Jim Connaughton, the  President’s advisor on the environment. We’ve been focusing our discussions on the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Energy and Climate. The meeting that we’re planning for  probably November of this year is starting to come together and take form. We’re working on  the sorts of outcomes that we hope we can achieve from that meeting.

With Secretary Rumsfeld, we naturally enough talked a fair bit about Iraq and Afghanistan -  it was the burden of that discussion, and some bilateral issues. And with Deputy Secretary  Zoellick, about those issues, but we also had a substantial discussion about East-Asian issues,  and I just wanted to touch on a couple of those. First of all in relation to North Korea, from  Australia’s perspective we’re very pleased that there has been some measure of an agreement  between the six parties, but it’s got to be understood, this is just a first step. There’s a long  way to go, particularly in terms of implementing a framework of this kind, but at least there’s  been agreement on a framework and that’s good progress. Australia will be very willing to  help with the implementation of the framework through providing technical expertise to assist  with verification through to providing development assistance to North Korea and helping  with the provision of energy as well. So, there are different ways that we can help with the  implementation of an agreement should this first step be translated into practical action, and I  hope it will be.

Other than that there has been some discussion also about the issue of Iran because the board  of governors at the International Atomic Energy Agency is now meeting in Vienna to  consider the issue of Iran and consider the possibility of a resolution, which would refer Iran  to the United Nations Security Council. That process has only just started though, but

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Australia is a member of the board of governors as is obviously the United States. So that’s a  brief outline of what I’ve been doing.

JOURNALIST:  Can I ask you about Iran? Are you in favour of having this issue referred to  the Security Council and do you believe that sanctions are a reasonable option?

MINISTER:  Let’s just take one step at a time. We certainly think it would be appropriate to  refer this matter to the United Nations Security Council. And assuming there’s a majority on  the board of governors for referral, and I think there will be, then there will be a subsequent  debate about whether the Security Council should act on this and what sort of a response there  will be from the Security Council. I don’t want to get into that, but certainly we’ll be  supporting the referral from the board of governors meeting to the Security Council.

JOURNALIST:  On North Korea, obviously Australia wasn’t a party to the six nation talks  but get to be involved in negotiations nevertheless. Does Australia take any credit for the  agreement?

MINISTER:  Well, I think a lot of credit has to go to China here. I think China has pushed  very hard to persuade the North Koreans at least to go along with a framework of this kind  and I’m glad the North Koreans have come to terms with that. I think Chris Hill on the part of  the United States has been a very good negotiator. I had dinner with Chris Hill back when I  was last here in May and we had a very long discussion about Australia’s perspectives on how  best to handle this. And we’ve been talking to the Chinese. I visited North Korea on two  occasions - it’s just impossible to quantify what impact Australia’s had. But it doesn’t matter,  I mean the main thing is that, you know, every success has a thousand fathers; every failure is  an orphan.

But in any case, we’ve made our contribution but, of course, the real heavy lifting has been  done by the United States itself and China. China has played a good part in this and it’s a  good development in Sino-American relations in my view. I have a positive view of relations  with China, including the United States’ relations with China and this is an illustration of  what can be achieved when the United States and China work successfully together.

JOURNALIST:  Following your meeting with Mr Rumsfeld, what assessment would you  make of progress in Iraq, and is there any end in sight?

MINISTER:  Well I think there are sort of three dimensions to look at this. First of all, just in  terms of the political process, the constitution, as you know, will be put to a referendum in the  middle of October. That’s a matter really for the Iraqis - they’ll decide whether to accept it or  not. I suppose there’s an expectation that it’s likely to get through but nothing is certain.  There are all sorts of factors, which could influence the outcome one way or another. If it does  get through then there will subsequently be elections on the basis of the new constitution.

One of the interesting developments politically is the speed with which the Sunnis are  embracing voter registration in any case. That’s seen as a good sign that they’re engaging  more in the political process. Though some of them may be registering in order to vote  against the constitution, but that’s part of the political process. You don’t have to be in favour  of the constitution and people are able to make their own decision.

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I think on the military side the challenge there is to build up the Iraqi forces to a point where  they themselves can be overwhelmingly responsible for security. Now that’s not to say that  when the Iraqi forces reach that point Al Zarqawi and his terrorists or some of the former  Saddam Hussein insurgents elements are just going to just abandon their campaign, but it’s  nevertheless encouraging that progress is being made. Not just in terms of the numbers in the  Iraqi Security Forces, and I think I’m right in saying those numbers are about 190,000. But  it’s encouraging that a growing number of those members of the Iraqi Security Forces are  capable of dealing with the insurgency, or capable of that type of work. Though they of  course have been assisted a lot by the Americans who are embedded in those units, and the  Americans have quite a few soldiers now, NCO’s and officers, embedded in Iraqi units to  make them more effective. Look, it’s headed in the right direction. It’s difficult, but all the  alternatives are worse. The alternative of just pulling out and abandoning Iraq to Al Zarqawi  and insurgents is too horrific to contemplate.

JOURNALIST:  On North Korea, as you said the first step. Is it fair to say that Australia is  safer and the region is more stable as a result of this, or is it too preliminary to make that  comment?

MINISTER:  Well, look, it’s a first step. I think it’s a good first step. It’s encouraging, but  you wouldn’t want to oversell it, I suppose. You know, proclaim this is an enormous triumph  or anything like that. But it’s a good first step. It’s real progress, and we’re encouraged by  that. Obviously if it’s going to be possible through this process for North Korea to abandon its  nuclear weapons ambitions and for East Asia to have a nuclear free Korean peninsula, that is a  very good development and we’re very pleased to see it. I know the Prime Minister has an  article today in the Wall Street Journal expressing his, or the Australian Government’s,  concern about the failure last week of the United Nations to make any progress on this issue  of WMD non-proliferation, but nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. It’s very  depressing for a country like Australia that the UN has failed. But then coming on the back of  that, it shows how quickly politics changes including international politics…coming on the  back of that we’ve had this good development in relation to North Korea, but it will require a  lot of work for this framework agreement to be implemented. Now, we’ve got a long way to  go before that happens.

JOURNALIST:  You mentioned other things - I’m not sure in what context, but on the  bilateral front are there any issues that would be of interest to us that you’ll be dealing with in  the next couple of days?

MINISTER:  I guess in terms of international relations I’ve covered the main issues. We and  the Americans are working very closely together on this Asia-Pacific partnership - on clean  energy and climate. We’re working to put together outcomes for the inaugural ministerial  meeting later this year. I’m not going to announce the announceables before we’ve agreed to  the announceables, but we’re coming up with some very practical ways of taking this issue  forward.

We sometimes get criticised for this, but we are very interested in outcomes, practical  outcomes, from international processes. And I’m pleased to say the American Administration  shares that perspective, so I think we’ll get some good announceables at this meeting in terms

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of dealing with the issue of climate change but also access to energy at more affordable prices  over time with changing technology. There are some small bilateral issues that we’re working  on that I don’t want to go into. But, you know, this relationship we have with the US is a very

strong and successful relationship. The fact that we’re able to work together and Australia is  able to play such a role in so many of the sorts of issues I’ve been talking about is a function  of a close alliance relationship. I notice what Mr Latham has had to say, both in his diaries  and subsequently. My only comment on that is that the Labor Party, as Mr Latham himself  says, knew only too well what Mr Latham’s position was on the US alliance. He made that  very clear on many occasions. If you go back and look at what I was saying and some of my  colleagues were saying in the Parliament last year, about Mr Latham and the Labor Party and  the US alliance, the Labor Party tried to deny some of the assertions we made. But Mr Latham  has confirmed that everything we said was entirely right. And the pretense made by Mr Rudd  and Mr Beazley and others, that, oh look, you know, we really believe very much in the  alliance and all of that, well, Mr Latham himself has blown a hole in that argument. It might  be history, I suppose, but it’s important history because it gets to the credibility of a political  party that aspires to be the Government of Australia.

JOURNALIST:  Did it come up at all at discussions with anyone today?

MINISTER:  No, I chose not to raise that issue. It’s hard for us Australians to imagine this  but down there in the Pentagon and the State Department they haven’t been trawling through  the Latham Diaries. I think their basic view is they’ve seen the back of Mr Latham and that’s  a good thing. The thing is that even people in the Labor Party who told us all at the time of the  last election how it was a good idea for everybody to support Mark Latham for Prime  Minister and now they’re going around saying it’s a good thing he didn’t win. I mean, Mr  Latham is, of course, never going to come again as a politician, but a lot of the Labor  politicians who were telling us last year that we should all go out and support Mr Latham and  support the Latham Government and what a great Prime Minister he would make, are now  saying, well, actually, he wouldn’t have been a very good Prime Minister. And maybe we  would have had to roll him in the Cabinet or even throw him out. How can you take a political  party seriously if one year they’re telling you one thing about their leadership and the next  year they’re telling you that they didn’t really mean it? The problem with that argument is that  it will come back to haunt them. Not Mr Latham, but their lack of consistency and lack of  integrity during the course of last year will come back to haunt them over the next two years.

(ends)



