Two months ago, I visited Pearce air force base near Perth to thank the aviators involved in the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.
There was a collective photograph with all the air crew: involving personnel from Australia, the United States and New Zealand – and also from China, Japan and South Korea.
Because of my impending trip to North Asia, I then sought a second, smaller photo.
But the Chinese and the Japanese were a little awkward standing close to each other – so, to secure the picture, I placed myself between them with my arms on the shoulders of the Japanese and Chinese officers.
When my colleague Joe Hockey delivered the recent budget, the ambassadors of China, the United States and Japan sat next to each other on the floor of the Australian parliament.
I wish I could say that our relations with the countries of Asia had always been so smooth.
Although a Japanese cruiser helped to escort the Australian army to Egypt at the start of World War One, Japan had been offended by the Immigration Restriction Act of our first national parliament.
Some of the most savage fighting of World War Two was between Australians and Japanese and some 10,000 Australian prisoners of war died in Japanese custody.
Even so, just 13 years later, at a time when Australian ex-service club car parks still banned Japanese vehicles, Japan’s then-prime minister, Prime Minister Abe’s grandfather, paid his respects at our war memorial.
For most of the next half century, Japan was Australia’s largest trading partner.
In the wake of Henry Kissinger’s famous 1971 trip, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was one of the very first Western leaders to visit China and to establish diplomatic relations.
Ever since, support for better relations with China has been settled, bi-partisan policy in Australia – long before China was to become our biggest trading partner over the last decade.
On successive days in 2003, the then presidents of the United States and China addressed our national parliament.
As Prime Minister John Howard famously put it, this demonstrated that Australia did not have to choose between its history and its geography.
Another way of saying it might be that we’ve never been in the business of making new friends by losing old ones.
But Australia hasn’t reached out to the countries of Asia only when it suited us.
Sixty years ago, we set up the Colombo Plan to bring our region’s best and brightest to Australian universities – and now we are setting up the New Colombo Plan to take our best and brightest to the universities of our region.
During the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Australia provided credit facilities to our Asian neighbours.
When the Indian Ocean Tsunami hit, just five years after our work for the independence of East Timor and two years after terrorists had killed 88 Australians in Bali, Australia provided a billion dollars to help Indonesia to rebuild.
Whether it’s the earthquake in Japan, the typhoon in the Philippines, or the ongoing underwater search of 60,000 square kilometres of deep ocean for MH370, in our own neighbourhood and further afield, Australia has always been amongst the very first to lend a hand and the very last to say “enough”.
I suspect that this “regional mateship” – as John Howard called it – was at least a subliminal factor in our successful free trade negotiations with Japan and Korea.
It helps that, in most circumstances, Australia is strong enough to be useful but not big enough to be threatening.
It also helps that there are some two million Australians of Asian background and that Mandarin is Australia’s most widely spoken language after English.
It helps that Australia now schedules annual ministerial meetings with India and with Singapore (as well as with the US and with the UK) and annual heads of government meetings with Indonesia and with Japan as well as with China.
Still, Australian prime ministers and ministers have met the Dalai Lama, visited Taiwan, and protested against China’s unilateral declaration of an air defence identification zone over territory that Japan administers.
And there are currently some 1100 US marines rotating through Darwin.
Through all this, we’ve managed to be both a good friend to China and the strongest possible ally of the United States.
We’ve been clear about our own values without hectoring other countries.
Our instinct is not to dwell on differences but to seek common ground and to build on it.
Our preference is always to look forwards rather than backwards, to win friends rather than to find fault, and to be helpful, not difficult.
As citizens of a great power, it’s understandable that Americans should be wary of potential rivals.
But America is the first great power in history that has sought to liberate other countries rather than to dominate them.
The wars that America and its allies have fought have been wars of freedom, not conquest.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in”.
This is the true and authentic voice of the world’s exceptional, indispensable nation.
America should take pride in others’ success because it has done so much to make that success possible.
Japan and Korea have risen from the ashes of war to astonishing economic success under a US security umbrella.
China has become the world’s second largest economy by becoming more like America, not less like it, in cultivating business success.
One day, China will liberalise more than its economy because people who are free to get rich will apply that creativity to other aspects of their lives.
For America to begrudge what the Chinese haven’t yet achieved – more than to admire what they have – would be out of character, especially as the movement, in just a generation, of hundreds of millions of Chinese into the middle class is a transformation unparalleled in human history.
It’s the greatest and the quickest advance in human welfare of all time and the Chinese people and government have every right to be proud of it.
The rise of China is not without its complications for regional stability but so far has undeniably and indisputably been good for the world.
A rich China is not just a billion new customers but a billion people with a massive stake in keeping the peace – scarcely less than Americans have – because it’s impossible to have a prosperous world that’s not also a peaceful one.
The relationship between America and China is worth all the effort that both countries are putting into it – because no relationship is more vital for the world’s future.
I remain fundamentally optimistic because conflict is in no one’s best interest.
We will all advance together or none of us will advance at all.
I am confident that the coming century will indeed be the Asian century – but only if America is there too, to keep the peace and enforce the rules.
America has long been asked to bear burdens expected of no other nation.
But you’ll never walk alone.
Australia has been America’s partner in every conflict from World War One to Afghanistan.
Undoubtedly, America will have more important friends.
Occasionally, America will have more useful friends.
But America will never have a more dependable friend…than Australia.
[ends]