Thank you, Phil, for that remarkable innovation in Australian political etiquette. I've never been at a function yet where they've suspended table cuisine for an address by any politician, Government or opposition. Ladies and gentlemen, could you please put your hands together again for the Qantas Australian Boys Choir.
And I begin by acknowledging the First Australians on whose land we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
I also acknowledge Premier John Brumby, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, my ministerial colleagues too many to name - in fact, why aren't you all at work this evening? - parliamentary colleagues, both federal and state, friends of America, friends of Australia, friends and supporters one and all of this great alliance between our two great democracies.
Thank you, Premier John Brumby, for agreeing to host this important national dialogue. For the benefit of our American friends, Melbourne was in fact the capital of Australia between 1901 and 1927, and from the point of view of our Victorian friends, nothing should have changed. In fact, from the point of view of our Victorian friends, nothing has changed.
This is a truly extraordinarily and remarkably Australian of cities, rich in its architecture, rich in its cultural and intellectual life, rich in its culture of innovation and enterprise, and a city which can turn out 100,000 people at the MCG to watch two flies race up a wall - and even more for other, more-elevated sporting events.
I understand that our American friends last night were treated to a game of AFL at the MCG between Hawthorn and Adelaide. I was a told a story that after the game last night, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Hawkey to Australians, was waiting with others for the bus to take him back to the hotel with other members of the Dialogue. The bus was late. A car went by. A bunch of young people rolled down the window and said ‘Bob Hawke, Hawkey, you are a legend', to which Hawkey replied, ‘yes, I know that, and will you give me a lift back to the hotel?'
In the remarkable culture that is Australia, that's exactly what happened, and Hawkey got back to the hotel first. Bob, we love you for who you are, and the attributes of Australian culture you continue to demonstrate.
Hawkey would also in large measure see himself as a product of this great city.
My own connection, of course, is that I'm married to a woman who lived and was educated here in Melbourne, and who mysteriously still insists that it was she, uniquely, who brought culture to our marital union.
As a loyal son of Queensland, I take exception to that - albeit ineffectively.
Can I also acknowledge Phil Scanlan - the Great Helmsman of our dialogue these last 17 years. Thank you, Phil, for your leadership for all these years. Thank you for your continued leadership as Australia's Consul General in New York, where the Scanlan School of effective Australian diplomacy is about to be metered out to the unsuspecting burghers of New York.
Can I also acknowledge Australia's Ambassador to the United States, Dennis Richardson. Dennis was appointed by my predecessor and has served both governments and the relationship between both our countries with the highest degree of professionalism, and I would like to congratulate Dennis publicly on his appointment, announced two days ago, as Secretary of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade - just as I congratulate Michael L'Estrange for his nearly five years at the helm of the Australian foreign service, also having served governments of both political persuasions with loyalty and with distinction.
Now, Dennis finds himself as Australia's most senior diplomat, though having known Dennis for almost the last 30 years, there are those who doubt that the words Dennis and diplomacy belong in the same sentence.
I disagree, and disagree fundamentally. It's just that Dennis's diplomacy has always belonged to that fully robust and fully Australian tradition of diplomacy.
Dennis, in fact, as some of you may know this already, was my first boss in government. He was a branch head, I was a new recruit to the then Australian Foreign Service. He taught me way back then the essential skills of the Australian Prime Ministership:
* First, know how to photocopy
* Second, know how to collate. It comes in handy for policy coordination
* And third, the most important principle of all, always do what Dennis tells you to do.
Dennis, nothing has changed.
Could I also acknowledge again all those gathered here tonight to honour the ties that bind our two great democracies - our friends from America, who have come again to honour this relationship, and friends also of our alliance all these years.
To our American friends, could I say this - you know you are welcome guests in Australia. It's now close to 20 years since we first met in Georgetown, and as I remarked to Bruce Reed earlier today, none of us have changed one bit since.
This Dialogue has become an important informal network of ideas and of individuals who have helped to build the broader fabric of our relationship, and for Therese and I, to our American friends tonight we would simply say this - you have become part of our wider family, and tonight at the first Dialogue that I have attended as Prime Minister of Australia, together with Therese, I would like to thank you personally for the friendship you have shown us over so many, many years.
There is one who is not with us tonight, a person so instrumental in our beginnings, a person so fundamental in our continuity, a person so full of unbridled optimism about our future - and I speak, of course, of Anne Wexler.
I speak for all of us in honour of Anne. Not for her politics, for we all know her to have been the proudest of Democrats, but for Anne the person, Anne the human being, Anne the proudest of Americans.
When I was last in Washington in March, we honoured Anne at the Australian Ambassador's residence with a presentation on behalf of all her Australian friends.
When I rang her a week or so before she died, she was full of reflection but equally full of the future.
She recalled sitting between Kim Beazley and I at the first Dialogue Dinner, held in Georgetown in 1993 as we - that's Kim and I - proceeded to have a characteristically robust Australian exchange, I think on the rise of China.
Ever the diplomat, Anne said to me, this week or so before she died, she couldn't recall who prevailed in that particular discussion.
But what she did recall was that she figured these Aussies could be a feisty lot - and aided with a little bit of vino veritas - also a helluva lot of fun.
And so began her nearly 20-year love affair with Australia.
Her last words to me were about the future.
‘Kevin, what are we going to do about healthcare?
‘Kevin, how will we get it through the Congress?
‘How can we get proper healthcare for all Americans?'
With only a few days to live, this, for me, was vintage Anne.
Last Tuesday, as Phil has just mentioned, I spoke in her honour in the Australian Parliament, as did the Leader of the Opposition.
She has left a mark on us all.
And to honour her for the future, I am pleased to announce tonight that the Australian Government will henceforth fund the Anne Wexler Scholarship Program.
These scholarships will begin next year. They will be postgraduate scholarships. They will be small in number. They will be high in prestige. They will be available to Australians and Americans undertaking studies in each other's countries. They will be more generous than the Fulbright.
They will embrace the breadth of the common interest and common values that will bind our two democracies for the century ahead.
And I'm pleased to have announced this without any reference to my own bureaucracy, so my apologies to public servants here present, but before making any further announcement on the details, we will finalise all details with her lifelong partner Joe.
So Phil, when we the Dialogue next meets in DC, could I boldly suggest that we have our first address from our first Anne Wexler scholars.
Anne Wexler, Honorary Member of the Order of Australia, your spirit will be with us for the future in the lives and the minds and the values of the next generation of Australian and American leaders.
Friends, it is customary for each generation to say that the generation of which they happen to be part is confronted with challenges of unprecedented complexity.
There can be a certain arrogance of the present, insufficiently mindful of the forces faced by those who have come before us, and insufficiently mindful of the challenges and forces that will confront our successors.
We are, when we reflect on the span of history, barely seven generations removed from the existential challenges of the American Revolution, followed barely two generations later by the existential challenge that was the Civil War.
Then the killing fields of Flanders, where our two great nations discovered the unspeakable, the unspeakable horrors of global war.
Then the near equal horror of global recession. The rise and the fall of fascism. The unspeakable obscenity that was the holocaust. A generation of Cold War. The collapse of global communism.
And so to our present age with the rise of global terrorism, the rise of China, the rise of India, the emerging economies as new forces in global politics, security and the global economy, and now the potentially existential threats of climate change, energy security, food security and water - matters which have been deliberated upon during the dialogue both today and yesterday - compounded by the rapid global spread of communicable infectious diseases.
In fact, as the planet has shrunk, it seems our problems have expanded - or at least compounded. Or, put another way, as the world has globalised, so too have our challenges globalised, and so too has the scope of the solutions become globalised as well.
But my central message tonight is that as vital democracies and as vital economies we should be daunted by none of this - by none of this.
While the challenges are great, they are not beyond our collective wisdom, nor are they beyond our common resolve to act, to act decisively and to act effectively for the future.
Just as those who came before us, so too can our generation prevail against the fresh challenges that history and circumstances have thrown at us.
The challenges may be different, but the choices, in essential respects, are constant:
* Choices between war and peace;
* Choices between cooperation and conflict;
* Choices between transparency versus secrecy;
* And yes, choices ultimately between the strength of democracies and those who would seek to bring democracies down.
Of course there is discouragement, there are setbacks, there are defeats, but if we are to be clear-headed about the future, we should be equally clear-headed and clear-minded about the progress we have made, the successes we have had, and the successes we can still have if we act together: progress in our response to the global financial crisis; the possibility of progress on climate change; the possibility, too, of progress in crafting a truly Asia-Pacific century.
Let me say something about the global financial crisis.
It may be a passing strange to a number in this room how close the world came to the edge in September of 2008, barely 12 months ago. Global financial flows ground to a virtual halt. We poised ourselves at the abyss.
The response to that could have been as it was by our predecessors in the Great London Conference of the early 1930s, where in confronting the challenge which was posed then by the unfolding global depression, they failed to rise to that challenge.
The consequence? Political disagreement, blaming one of another, no coordinated action, fiscal contraction, an outbreak of trade protection, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Depression unfolded to the tawdry tale of the 1930s - sustained recessionary economic performance, resulting in turn in sustained high levels of unemployment, fanning the fires of political extremism, the rise of fascism, and so too to war and its consequences.
On this occasion, the world has chosen a different course - informed by history, informed in part by the deliberations on the Great Depression by John Maynard Keynes, informed also by US global leadership.
What did we do differently this time? We, as countries of the world decided to coordinate our response through monetary policy to provide that necessary stimulus across the world to bring real economic activity back from the brink.
We decided as the countries and communities of the world to convene the G20, the 20 largest economies in the world, to act with coordinated action on fiscal policy to bring life to the real economy.
We decided also to act together, to begin to engineer a reform, fundamentally, of the rules of the financial system, work which has now been devolved to the Financial Stability Board, in order to restore confidence, in time, to financial markets.
We resolved together as the countries of the world to properly resource the IMF. Why was that necessary? To ensure that our international, our global financial policeman would have the resources at its disposal to act, and act decisively, should we see a further round of implosions in toxic assets in banks in Europe, most particularly in central and Eastern Europe.
And finally, as the countries and the economies of the world, we resolve that there should be no outbreak of global trade protectionism, learning, fundamentally, from the lessons of the early 1930s.
The good news is that the Washington Summit, convened by former President Bush, commissioned this work. Though much criticised at the time, it led, less than six months later, to the London Summit, under a different US President, President Obama, a London Summit which executed the work commissioned for it by the Washington Summit.
For those present in this room, and particularly those of you from Australia and elsewhere from the business community, the impact of the London Summit in early April of this year on global confidence and the trajectory towards global recovery has been fundamental. Do not take my word for it. Do not take the word of politicians from across the world. Study the technical deliberations of the International Monetary Fund themselves as they reflected on the core events of March and April this year when, still, the world teetered at the edge.
What happened in the time since April, since the global economies convened in London, was that confidence, both business and consumer has begun to recover, that because of a decision by governments, collectively, across the developed and developing economies, to inject $5 trillion plus into the real economy through fiscal stimulus, on top of the measures that we commissioned for reform of the financial system, we began to see the slow, slow recovery of our world economy.
This was a signal achievement, in vast contrast to that which occurred in the 1930s, and it was made possible on the back of US global economic leadership. That should be a fundamental message for us all.
Leadership displayed under the previous Republican administration, leadership executed under its succeeding Democrat administration, leadership demonstrated in both cases by the United States of America.
The challenge, of course, is by no means past us. We face challenges still. We are not out of the woods yet. There is a long way to go, and the challenges which lie before us at the upcoming Pittsburgh Summit of the G20 next month are equally formidable, and they are broadly threefold:
* To ensure implementation of that which we agreed to execute in London;
* To ensure, further, that we have a mechanism available to us in time, and at the appropriate time, to exit the extraordinary interventions that we have engaged in, both fiscal and monetary, as well as the provision of bank guarantees, in a coordinated fashion which enables the recovery to be sustained and not interrupted; and
* Furthermore, and most importantly for the long term, to begin among the comity of nations to develop and to agree a new global strategy for economic growth. This is critical.
The global ‘growth gap' is a consequence of the wealth destruction which has occurred as a consequence of the global financial crisis. By some estimates, US households and their wealth fell by some $12 trillion over the last two years as a consequence of the falls in the housing and stock markets.
As household wealth has fallen, consumers have naturally responded by increasing their domestic savings rates, and we are already seeing US savings rates on the rise, reaching as high as nine per cent this year after falling below zero in 2007.
The slowdown in US consumer demand alone could leave a $500 billion hole in the US economy.
This ‘growth gap' amounts to nearly 4 per cent of US GDP, and in other countries, similar wealth destruction is having a similar effect. To fill this ‘growth gap' for the future, we must begin to build the foundations of a new growth strategy for the global economy for the future, to place our global economy in the future on a more stable footing, not simply contingent on the boom and bust cycles of the past, not simply contingent on US consumption driven by US debt, consumer and corporate, funded by capital transfers out of North-East Asia and the Middle East.
This is likely to prove to be an unsustainable model for the future, and thus we, as the community of nations must begin to develop an alternative strategy for the future, and that will and must be part of our deliberations in Pittsburgh next month.
The government of Germany under Angela Merkel has already advanced what she describes as a new Global Economic Charter for the future. The rest of us must continue to work with that framework and involve, in fact, a new strategy for the future, one which is capable of producing sustainable economic growth for the long term.
For Australia, we've been embarked on a similar program at home. Our fiscal strategy in response to the global economic crisis has been vigorous. We've also acted, through the Reserve Bank, on monetary policy. We've also, through our interventions in providing guarantees to our banks for their deposits and for their interbank lending, arrived at a situation where of the 11 remaining AA+ rated banks in the world, 4 of those 11 are Australia.
We arrive, therefore, as a consequence of these collective measures, at a position today whereby Australia;
* among the OECD economies, is the fastest-growing economy in the world,
* that among the major advanced economies we have the second-lowest unemployment in the world;
* that we have the lowest net debt and the lowest deficit among the major advanced economies in the world, and
* beyond that, we are the only advanced economy not to have so far gone into technical recession.
But we are not out of the woods yet, nor is the global economy. Nationally, we will have to prosecute, consistent with our colleagues around the world, an exit strategy from the extraordinary interventions that we've undertaken, and we'll have to develop here, as I've outlined recently in my comments publically, a sustainable, long-term economic development strategy, parallel to that which we must develop globally as well.
But in all these things, national action alone will not count. Global action is that which will count, and the leadership of the Obama administration will be critical in Pittsburgh and beyond.
The spirit that I saw alive in London is a spirit which must characterise our future as well. Sitting around the table with heads of government from the G20 countries, President Obama sitting there, President Hu Jintao across the table from him, together with the President of France, the Prime Minister of Britain, and others, as everyone spoke to a common purpose, which transcended whatever divisions may exist between us politically or in other areas - how do we bring the global economy back from the brink, how do we implement a global strategy in order to ensure that our people are not thrown into the mass unemployment that so plagued our planet in the 1930s.
It is that spirit which I saw alive in the dining room at Number 10 in April this year, which must continue to characterise our global deliberations for the future.
I said before that we must be mindful of our successes and the challenges for possible future success as well. I've spoken of the global financial crisis, the global economic recession, and the challenges which lie ahead and what we've achieved so far. So too do those challenges present themselves to us in climate change.
For climate change, Copenhagen looms close.
L'Aquila, the conference of the major economies forum and the G8 achieved some success, some success in defining a two degrees Centigrade limit at beyond which global temperatures should not rise. But the challenges between Pittsburgh and Copenhagen are real, challenges which go to how do we in fact ensure that developed countries rise to the challenge of having verifiable targets, midterm and long term, that developing countries and emerging economies also share their burden for the future by having verifiable actions through to 2020 and 2050, and that we can develop among us agreed international financing mechanisms to underpin the challenges which emerging economies face in order to bring about fundamental transformations in their energy postures for the future.
The G20 again looms as the vehicle, through Pittsburgh, to give credence, to give coherence, and to give the possibility of outcome at Copenhagen and beyond, and that is a challenge which lies with us for the future.
I conclude on a challenge closer to home, here in our own region, the Asia-Pacific region.
Our world needs, at the continuation and the enhancement, of a global rules-based order, so too does our region, the Asia Pacific region.
Here in our region we've had some success over the years. The Association of South-East Asian Nations has formed an entity called ASEAN, which has turned former combatants into partners. If we reflect back as to where the South-East Asian nations lay 40 years ago as to where they are today, it is a testimony to the effectiveness of that act in regionalism to bring together people into a common purpose for the future.
For our wider region, the Asia-Pacific region, the challenge is parallel - how do we craft a future among ourselves which is both peaceful and prosperous. APEC has brought together the economies of our region. The East Asian Summit has brought together many of the polities of our region, but regrettably to date excluding the United States.
Our region is still plagued by unresolved and significant territorial disputes, whether it's in the Taiwan Straits, on the Korean Peninsula, in the South China Sea, or in Kashmir.
The challenge for the future is how do we form among us with creativity and with an entrepreneurial spirit, a new Asia-Pacific Community which is capable of bringing about a common sense of security and political purpose for this, the Pacific Century, in the century as it unfolds.
On questions of security, to inculcate a culture of transparency rather than secrecy. How do we fashion and build confidence and security building measures, beginning with such modest areas as common responses to national disasters in our region, whereby our armed forces and our emergency services work together and in an instant to respond to this, one of the most natural disaster prone regions in the world.
These are the challenges which lie ahead. These are the challenges to which we can rise.
I believe, friends, that we can rise to all of these challenges, if our political resolve and our political will is up to it. All of these, in critical respects, will depend on the continuation of US global and regional leadership. It is leadership which we, in this country, Australia, are proud to support, and we intend to be your partners for the future.
We should therefore among us have absolute confidence that we can have the collective resolve, the collective political will, and the collective political imagination to rise to each of the challenges I've referred to this evening.
We can do so.
There is one thing that can defeat us, and that is to allow our domestic political divides to so swamp our ability to see the greater global challenges which lie ahead of us.
I believe also we can rise beyond that challenge as well.
That's where the bipartisan and the truly international nature of this Dialogue embodies the spirit our region and the spirit of the world that we will need to draw upon to deal with these great challenges of the future.
I salute this dialogue. I salute each and every one of you who have been participants in it, as we must harness again the great energies and vitalities of our democracies and our economies to deal with these great challenges of our common future.
I thank you.