

Inquiries:  (02) 6277 7500 1



MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS  HON ALEXANDER DOWNER, MP

TRANSCRIPTION: PROOF COPY E & OE

DATE:   27 July, 2007

TITLE:   Doorstop - DPP dropping charges against Dr Haneef, bilateral free trade  agreements, uranium, China.



PRESENTER: Mr Downer, I’ll just ask you about Dr Haneef - I’ll start with that - all  charges have been dropped. What’s your initial reaction?

MR DOWNER: This is a matter for the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions  and obviously the DPP makes the decisions in relation to charges and dropping charges and  we respect that. That’s how our system works so of course in terms of the legal processes, that  will pretty much be the end of the matter.

PRESENTER: Should he have his visa reinstated?

MR DOWNER: That’s a matter for Mr Andrews, the Immigration Minister. I’m sure  he’ll have something more to say about that.

PRESENTER:  (inaudible)

MR DOWNER: The Federal Government actually hasn’t been charging anybody. I  think this is the Labor narrative - that the Federal Government controls the police and the  Director of Public Prosecutions - we no more do that than state Labor Governments control  the state police and the state DPPs. These institutions operate at arm’s length from the  government and they always should and they always have. Nothing has changed in the last

few weeks. What the police do is the police conduct the investigation on the basis of the  information they have, then they refer the matter to the DPP, the DPP makes the decision in  relation to prosecution. In this particular case, the DPP has reviewed the evidence and decided  not to proceed with the charges. That is the decision of the DPP - all of these things were the  decision of the police and the DPP and we respect that.

PRESENTER: But you do have control over immigration.

MR DOWNER: We do over immigration.

PRESENTER:  (inaudible) on that front?



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MR DOWNER: That is true. We do control the issuing of the visas and withdrawal of  visas, withholding of visas and in that context, I’m sure Mr Andrews will have more to say  later in the day.

PRESENTER: Do you think that is an embarrassment for the Government - that there  was the potential of putting him in immigration detention and it has come out that there are no  charges?

MR DOWNER: There were charges so when there were charges, that was obviously a  significant issue. What will happen now the charges - it’s not true what you say, it’s not true  that there were no charges, there were charges - where the DPP has decided to withdraw  charges and that matter will obviously go back to Mr Andrews and he’ll have to make a  decision and have more to say about it later.

PRESENTER: Should he have his visa reinstated or not?

MR DOWNER: That’s a matter, not for me, but for the Immigration Minister.

PRESENTER: How do you think this will affect our relationship with India?

MR DOWNER: I don’t think it will. I think our relationship with India is good and a  strong relationship. I don’t think this will have any bearing on our relationship with India. My  view about it is that the Indians have the same sort of common law legal system that we have  and they understand the procedures. I’ve spoken with the Indian Foreign Minister, I’ve  spoken with the Health Minister over the last week - actually in the last seven days - and they  are interested in the case because they have consular responsibilities for Dr Haneef because he  is an Indian citizen. We respect that of course because we have Australians who get into  trouble overseas and we have consular responsibilities for them and we do what we can within  the law for those people. That’s what the Indians have been doing and we’ve been assisting  them with that.

PRESENTER: Just on trade, Minister, the Prime Minister is in Indonesia talking to  (inaudible) about a possible free trade agreement with Indonesia. Do we have too many of  these bilateral deals within APEC?

MR DOWNER: No, on the contrary. I’m not sure you can have too many of them. I  think the challenge is to try to ensure that they are reasonably well coordinated with each  other, that you don’t get much diversity in the terms of the free trade agreements, that they  have as much commonality with each other as possible and free trade agreements are a  catalyst for broader regional trade liberalisation and ultimately global trade liberalisation. So  if we can’t achieve global free trade overnight - which I would like to be able to do - we  shouldn’t just throw up our hands in despair and do nothing. We should try and find second  best alternatives. Free trade agreements are our second best but they are a good option and  we’ve negotiated a few, we’re negotiating some and a feasibility study into an FTA with  Indonesia would be a good step forward as well.



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PRESENTER: Robert McClelland said today (inaudible) too much and too many  resources going that way and drawing away from (inaudible).

MR DOWNER: Sure. What the Labor Party thinks is - this is part of the Rudd style -  it’s the stunt over substance. The stunt here is that if you vote for Labor, the DOHA round  will be complete. If you vote for Labor, then the climate will stop getting warmer and that it  will probably start getting cooler again. In the end, people just know that that is, to use a well  known phrase, bullshit. That’s what it is. It’s just bullshit. The fact is that the DOHA round is  at a fragile state. We are very engaged. We are one of the six key countries in that negotiation  and we would like to see a successful DOHA outcome. But by the way, I think it is going to  be very difficult if there is a successful DOHA outcome, to get an outcome that is going to be  as good as we had originally hoped. But actually, unlike the Labor Party, we can do more  things at once. The one thing they can do is pull a stunt. We can negotiate in the DOHA round  with the United States, the EU, Japan, India, Brazil and so on, but we can also at the same

time, negotiate bilateral free trade agreements. Labor is opposed to (inaudible) Mr  McClelland’s free trade agreements which means that in the end, you are going to get less free  trade under a Labor Government than you’d get under a Coalition Government and what that  means is Labor offers less opportunities for exports than the Coalition does. Quite a simple  proposition.

PRESENTER:  (inaudible) hard to get the outcome you do want from DOHA  (inaudible)?

MR DOWNER: Of course. But this is multilateral negotiation so you don’t have to be a  professor of (inaudible) or international relations to work out that you have to get the  agreement of a large number of countries - 130, 140 different countries - to get an agreement  in the DOHA round. It is incredibly difficult and Australia can’t just snap its fingers and fix it.  It has to be a long, it is a protracted, it is a difficult negotiation. I think we need to keep  pushing for the optimal outcome but it is very difficult. Countries like India and Brazil have  made it pretty clear that they don’t want to see manufacturing trade opened up too much and  other developing countries don’t want to see too much liberalisation in the services sector, the  EU’s not doing enough on agricultural market access, and apparently the Americans quite  rightly - quite appropriate criticism of the Americans - they are not doing enough in the area  of agricultural support. That is reducing it. So what the Labor Party will tell you is if you elect  the Labor Party, which wants to downgrade our relations with the United States, it will be  able to fix all of those problems overnight. As I said, I think we all understand how credible  that is.  I think I summed it up in a phrase. Bullshit.

PRESENTER: Just on uranium (inaudible).

MR DOWNER: Pakistan has shown absolutely no interest at all in Australian uranium  and it has shown no interest in negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency  (inaudible) a system of safeguards and inspections for the two nuclear power stations, non-military nuclear power stations that it has. And when you are talking about Pakistan, you are  talking about the Minister for Religious Affairs who no doubt is a worthy man - I don’t know  him at all, I just saw him on television last night - but I don’t think there’s any prospect in the  foreseeable future of exporting to Pakistan, unless Pakistan gets into some sort of system of



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UN inspections and control over its two civil nuclear facilities and it comes to Australia and  seeks a Nuclear Safeguards Agreement. It doesn’t seem likely that’s about to happen. We  haven’t made a decision to sell uranium to India either. We’ve just said that if they (inaudible)  their civil nuclear power plants to assist in the United Nations inspections, we’ll look at  negotiating a Nuclear Safeguards Agreement. Whether we’ll be able to achieve these  successful negotiations, we just don’t know, we’ve never tried.

PRESENTER: Do you think it will (inaudible) tensions in the region though?

MR DOWNER: No of course not. India already has 14 nuclear power plants. Pakistan  has two. Whether we sell uranium or not isn’t going to make any difference to whether it has  nuclear power plants or not. They’ve got them already. If I felt that by us saying we wouldn’t  sell uranium to India - that is the sort of Labor Party proposition - if we say we won’t sell  uranium to India than India will abandon their nuclear weapons program, I’d do that. But you  see, it’s not true. That’s not going to happen. India has a nuclear weapons program and they  are sticking with it and whether we like that or not, we have to accept that as an existing fact  and build policy on the back of fact, not on some sort of fairytale hope.

PRESENTER: China’s saying they are not going to take anymore of our wool  (inaudible) - do you have any concerns there?

MR DOWNER: We do. We are concerned about that and we are taking that up with the  Chinese Government but we’ve been taken by surprise. I must say that we hadn’t really  expected they would claim that their quota had been filled at this stage, relatively early in the  year, so we’re taking it up with them, getting more information.

Thank you.

[Ends]

