APEC summit preview
Sydney is about to be invaded by Prime Ministers, Presidents, Foreign Ministers, Trade Ministers for APEC - the annual summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group.

The Commonwealth summit in Sydney in 1978 may have drawn more leaders, but APEC can safely claim to be the most significant diplomatic event hosted by Australia.

At three hundred and thirty million dollars, it's certainly the most costly,

The senior officials are meeting over this weekend to prepare the way. The Foreign and Trade Ministers hold two days of talks at mid-week and then the 21 leaders take over Sydney.

For Radio Australia's Foreign Affairs correspondent, Graeme Dobell this will the 12th APEC summit he's covered.

Perhaps APEC should adopt a line from Browning, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". Certainly APEC knows about reaching for much more than it can achieve.

That's why the key word in John Howard's effort to get an Asia Pacific consensus on tackling climate change is "aspirational". The Prime Minister wants the leaders to agree to a long-term aspirational goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, goes in harder saying APEC must produce concrete outcomes. If it fails to act, he says, APEC has little future.

Experience says action and APEC sometimes don't go together. APEC is good at aspirations. That is what it does. This consensus-based creature, created during a wet week in Canberra back in 1989 doesn't have the power to issue binding resolutions. That's the UN Security Council. Nor does it lock in tarriff levels and judge trade polices. That's the World Trade Organisation.

APEC gets together the biggest beasts in the forrest and when you have powers as different as China, Japan and the United States, that is an achievement.

The aspirational side was set early. At the Bogor summit in Indonesia, in 1994, APEC pledged to achieve free trade in the Asia Pacific for all developed members by 2010, and free trade for all developing members by 2020. Three years away from 2010, we can see that APEC is set for a Robert Browning moment. Its grasp is going to fall well short of that free trade heaven.

Bogor, by the way, was where the funny outfit tradition began. Suharto got them all into batik shirts, and we've been having fun with the leaders' group photo ever since - ponchos, leather jackets, peasant shirts, and last year in Hanoi, the 18 chaps and three women looked fetching in the full length silk dresses or perhaps they were smocks.

It could be worse. At the annual ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting, they have to sing as well as dress up and that really puts the croak in karaoke.

So in Sydney, there'll be more words on free trade, a new effort on climate change and some quiet work on the security fault lines in the Asia Pacific. One of the batik wearers from Bogor, Paul Keating, leapt in a week ago saying APEC was avoiding the biggest issue, the dangerous spiral in relations between China and Japan that could end in war.

(Transcript of Paul Keating talking to Kerry Obrien)

KERRY O'BRIEN: But why aren't the major leaders seeing this, if it's such a compelling argument?
PAUL KEATING: In the end they're turkeys Kerry, they won't take the big issues on, you see.

Ah, the APEC leaders as "turkeys"....Paul Keating always did put the verve into vernacular.

The summiteers do know about what Keating used to call the big picture. One hope is that the C in APEC will one day stand for Community... that was the source of the Gareth Evans joke, that APEC - Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation -- is four adjectives in search of a noun.

The ultimate goal of the European Community is to see that there's not another war between Germany and France. The aspirational Asia Pacific Community has several such goals - keeping the United States engaged in Asia, managing the rise of China, finding a role for Japan equal to its importance, giving Australia and the ASEAN states a say in the whole process.

All very difficult even to reach for, much less grasp.

< back