Australia and Europe launch new Pacific aid partnership
Updated
The two largest donors of aid to the Pacific, Australia and the European Union, have launched a new partnership agreement, during a visit to Paris by Australia's foreign minister Stephen Smith.
The agreement ranges widely, across foreign policy and security issues, to non-proliferation, Asia-Pacific regional developments, as well as climate change. Of course the global financial crisis also featured in the talks. The crisis recently led the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, to question whether now is the time to discuss how rich nations can progress development goals. France currently holds the rotating EU leadership and the EU is the largest single investor in Australia.
Presenter: Linda Mottram
Speaker: Stephen Smith, Australia's Foreign Minister
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STEPHEN SMITH: The agreement really takes our relationship with the European Union to the front line of our international relationships and it applies across the board to strategic and security considerations, both regional and global, but also to the array of issues that confront us in the modern world - climate change to trade and investment, to science and education and technological cooperation. It really transforms our relationship from one where the focus historically had been our complaints about the common agricultural policy to setting us up for the future so there are shared values and shared approaches to significant challenges and that's a very good thing from Australia's perspective.
LINDA MOTTRAM: OK, well, some of those shared values and challenges are in the Asia Pacific region. To what extent will this agreement influence how Australia and the EU work in that region?
STEPHEN SMITH: This was one of the areas where we spoke about it and we agreed this was an area where both in the case of France bilaterally and with the European Union as well, there's much potential for greater cooperation. After Australia and New Zealand, the European Union is the next largest development assistance partner or donor in the Pacific and it's very important because Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, all have long-term enduring objectives when it comes to development assistance in the Pacific. France, of course, for example, has got long-standing historical interest in the Pacific. So we think it's an area where there can be greater cooperation between ourselves and New Zealand as well and we think that's a good thing because we're very conscious of being a good international citizen in our own region and it helps if we're doing that in cooperation with our partners and friends like New Zealand and the European Union.
LINDA MOTTRAM: Did you discuss China's role as a donor to Asia Pacific nations, bearing in mind not only the disproportionately huge amounts of money that China is offering in countries like Cambodia, Laos but also China's no-strings- attached approach as a donor the region?
STEPHEN SMITH: In passing, and I again make the point, and this is a view shared both by France and the European Union, if you're going to be a development assistance partner then you need to have a long-term objective and Australia has been critical in the past of what we describe as cheque-book diplomacy and that's not the approach of Australia or France or the European Union or New Zealand in the Pacific for that matter. So we've been critical publicly and privately of a short-term approach to development assistance and we discussed that in passing but today our discussions were much more focused on our optimism about the positive things that Australia and the European Union can do together and in a bilateral sense the things that Australia and France can do together.
LINDA MOTTRAM: And just finally, at a meeting of aid officials at last month's UN General Assembly, Bernard Kouchner was in fact saying it was sort of unfair to be talking about trying to alleviate poverty when rich countries were fighting the global financial meltdown. Do you get a sense that their priorities perhaps need to be readjusted?
STEPHEN SMITH: No, I make the point, which is Australia's position, Australia does not see the need to fall back on our commitments to the millennium development goals and assisting developing countries just because of the international financial crisis. We remain very strongly committed to increasing our development assistance to 0.5% of GNI - gross national income - by 2015, I made that point. I also made the point in the different context that Australia also didn't see the need to move away from a long-term structural addressing of dangerous climate change because there was a short-term financial or economic difficulty internationally. And I think it's fair to say that that sentiment is shared by the European Union and I think it's also shared by France
