Today is the 4th of December 2009.
Exactly 18 months ago, on the 4th of June 2008, just across the other side of Sydney Harbour, I delivered a speech and put forward the idea of an Asia Pacific community.
In that first speech I said I wanted to begin a conversation about where we wanted our regional institutions to be in 2020.
I said that we should share our thoughts, our hopes and our dreams on what sort of community we needed to secure a bright future for the nations of the Asia Pacific.
I said that our region needed to have a conversation about how to maximise the benefits of its dynamism, and to manage the challenges that its dynamism would also bring.
In the intervening 18 months, we have come a fair way in that conversation.
The conversation began in earnest when Dick Woolcott began his regional consultations.
Judging from the metrics around his consultations, it was quite an intense start to the conversation: 21 countries, 85 days, and discussions with more than 300 individuals, including more than 30 ministers and eight heads of state or heads of government.
The conversation continued with the keynote address I gave to the Shangri-la dialogue in Singapore, where I set out in more detail my case for why we needed this conversation and the direction we needed to head for by 2020.
A new phase in the conversation was reached when I outlined my vision of an APc to the leaders of the East Asia Summit in October and then to APEC leaders in November.
Those conversations signified the considerable interest in the APc at Leaders level, and enriched my own appreciation of what was wanted by other leaders.
So, after 18 months, I am pleased that the countries of the region are increasingly comfortable about the fact that a conversation about the future of our regions is both useful and increasingly necessary.
Our region has been well served to date by the institutions we have all created in the past:
* starting with the great work of ASEAN
* through APEC
* then the ARF
* and now the EAS
* even ASEM.
Each of these institutions has evolved to meet changing needs - of which ASEAN's evolution in terms of membership and mandate is the most outstanding example.
But the fact is that 35 years after the end of war in Indo-China, 30 years after the revolution in Chinese politics, economics and foreign policy, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War, our region, the Asia Pacific region, is still without a regional institution with wide membership and a wide mandate to deal with the breadth and depth of political, security, economic and environmental challenges we will face for in the 21st century - the century of the Asia Pacific.
Which is why an informed regional conversation about our regional future (in the absence of any particular crisis) is good in itself.
So today, you are about to embark on the next stage in the conversation.
So can I first say to all of you that I am delighted you are here.
Your contributions, your individual engagement and your commitment will make this conference a success.
The fact that you come from so many different countries, and sectors - from government, from academia, from think tanks, from the media - with so many different interests in the APc will bring a new level of depth and vitality to the deliberations and the discussions.
And when it is all over, I look forward to reading the considered deliberations of this uniquely qualified group of individuals about where we are, where we need to go, and how we might consider getting there.
For me, there are three key messages that emerge about our region and its future.
First, it is dynamic.
In terms of scale, the countries of the region represent over half of global production and close to half of world trade.
They contain 60 per cent of the world's population.
They account for around 70 per cent of global carbon emissions.
Even in a time of global downturn, the Asia Pacific region is growing fast.
Key economies like China, with expected growth of 8.5 per cent this year, and India, with expected growth this year of 5.4 per cent, are leading the way.
Its dynamism is such that our region is the driver of global growth.
The Asia-Pacific region will account for 75 per cent of global economic growth next year.
But its dynamism is not just economic.
As economies grow, defence spending rises - and our region already had many of the largest standing armies in the world.
Our region is rapidly becoming the centre of global economic and strategic weight - driven by a rising China, a rising India, and long-standing powerhouses such as Japan and the continuing superpower that it is the United States.
In this context, great powers such as Russia also have an important role.
Second, our region is becoming infinitely more connected.
Some of this increasing connectedness follows from the impact of globalisation, and the people flows, the financial flows and the information technology platforms that power the globalisation process.
Some of it follows from our own deliberate actions to increase bilateral and multilateral interaction and to foster the inter-connectedness that now characterises our region.
APEC, for example, has been very successful in promoting trade between our economies.
On average, two-thirds of APEC member economies trade is now with other APEC members.
The key strategic implication of this compounding inter-connectedness is that what happens in one country in the
Asia Pacific is more likely than ever before to affect other countries.
Both for good.
And for ill.
In fact in this Asia Pacific region we are experiencing, with perhaps even greater intensity, this double impact of the wider globalisation process.
Because of the growing density of regional enmeshment, we are all now profoundly impacted by the actions of each other.
If China's economic growth was to collapse tomorrow, the impact for all of us would be great indeed.
Conversely, China's continuing economic growth is a major plus for us all in the current global recession.
Similarly, China, India and the United States - all members of the wider region - will profoundly shape the future of climate change for all our countries and beyond.
Furthermore, if any one of us was to drop the ball on the proper management of internationally communicable diseases, we are all affected because of the density of our regional people flows.
So in order to enhance the positive dimensions of growing regional inter-connectedness, and to manage any negative impacts, robust pan-regional institutions become more important, not less.
Third, our region faces challenges, and is likely to face more of them in the future.
I am an avowed optimist about our region - I believe it has the dynamism and trajectory to make the Asia-Pacific century truly pacific.
But as a region, we face a number of emerging challenges.
First, we need to develop a more sustainable and balanced model for the region's growth that does not rely solely on exports and avoids creating a further round of destabilising economic imbalances.
Second, our region has large populations and limited resources - creating the potential for competition for scarce resources - oil and gas, water and food.
Third, the region has unresolved border disputes, some of which traverse fields of substantial natural resources.
It has large and growing militaries - and five countries with nuclear weapons.
Our region still has a number of regional flashpoints, such as the DPRK, and we face a substantial challenge in acting on the threat of WMD proliferation.
Fourth, our region also has its share of non-traditional security threats - from terrorism, to transnational crime including illegal people movements.
Fifth, I have already referred to the pan-regional and pan-global threat of climate change, which if we fail to act will have devastating consequences for all our countries - economic, environmental, human security and ultimately strategic.
Finally, let us also acknowledge a fundamental strategic fact - our region lies at the confluence of the interests of five major powers - the United States, China, India, Russia and Japan.
These major powers live in harmony today.
But history should caution us, not to assume that peace, harmony and concord are somehow pre-determined and therefore inevitable for our region.
A cursory examination of the 19th and 20th century history of the European great powers suggests we should be cautious about any such assumption.
The truth is, common security has to be crafted by national states driven by a common purpose.
And here, once again, is where the role of regional institution building is so important.
For example, here in the Asia-Pacific is where the template for the US-China relationship will be forged, and where their interests - competitive and complementary - will need to be managed, harmonised and reconciled.
So far, the United States and China have managed this well on a largely bilateral basis.
It may be that in the future this is supplemented by the emerging norms of regional institution building.
If the range of challenges I have outlined were static, I would be supremely confident that we could manage them.
But the truth is they are not static, they are profoundly dynamic and if not handled skilfully, potentially destabilising.
The enduring lesson of history is that the only constant in international relations is change.
And in our region, with its inherent power, its internal diversity and its dynamism, the prospects for rapid change are great.
In a region that is dynamic and increasingly inter-connected, and which already has its share of challenges, we need increasingly to manage our futures together.
Globally, this is the lesson of the G20's response to the global financial crisis, as together we stared into the global abyss and decided to act in the global good.
Globally, this is also the lesson of climate change although it is still uncertain what will be produced at Copenhagen.
We need therefore, in our own region, to be alert to where our trajectories are leading us, to points of friction that may be ahead, and to ways that we can cooperate more closely for our shared interests.
In short, we need to plan - we need to plan with each other, rather than against each other as has often been the custom in times past.
We cannot simply allow our region to drift in the face of the challenges ahead.
We need actively to shape our regional future.
We all have an interest in finding the best possible mechanism to avoid strategic friction, to maximise strategic stability and to enhance the depth and breadth of our political and economic engagement with each other - and the regional norms that underpin that engagement.
The key question for this conference, and behind my proposal for an Asia-Pacific Community, is how do we best manage our region's increasing dynamism, our increasing inter-dependency and the common challenges we face?
What is the best mechanism to address the full spectrum of challenges facing the region: economic, political and strategic?
How do we ensure that our current outward-looking regionalism continues as the bed-rock of Asia-Pacific integration?
How do we foster a deeper regional culture of cooperation and entrench the habits of consultation and so avoid any future conflict?
How do we craft integrated solutions to the complex and multi-faceted problems we face?
It cannot just be assumed this will occur naturally.
Nor do I imagine that it will be easy or fast.
But we are assisted by the fact that we have been collectively building our regional community for decades - whether through ASEAN and its off-shoots, APEC, the ARF and a whole host of connections that these great institutions have so effectively fostered.
But it is my view that we can do so much more together across our wider region as we seek to plan together for the century ahead.
So what sort of Asia-Pacific community do we see as being required?
Quite deliberately, I have given no complete answer to this question in the eighteen months of our conversation.
We believe that we have asked a good set of questions, but we do not claim to have all of the answers.
We claim no monopoly of wisdom on these questions which is why I have valued the wise counsel of senior
regional statesmen such as Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Chok Tong, Lee Hsien Loong, President Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Najib.
Our ambition in Australia has been to open paths for dialogue rather than to close them off, to listen as much as to speak, to encourage conversation rather than seek to dominate it.
After all, if we are in the business of fashioning a new collaborative institution, the process of institution-building itself must be collaborative.
From our perspective, the conversation of the last 18 months has been a successful start that will become in time a more focused dialogue.
There has been no shortage of commentary on our proposal.
Some critical.
Some supportive.
But all, in my view, welcome.
The regional discussion on institution building has also been enhanced by the very useful contribution of Prime Minister Hatoyama of Japan on the future of our region.
This conference's deliberations are designed as a further demonstration of Australia's keenness to learn as much from you on your countries' aspirations for our region's future.
As well as offering some perspectives of our own.
First, an APc must engage all key countries that make up our region.
It should include all the major powers - including the United States, which would need to be a member of any future Asia Pacific community, if it was to embrace the totality of our region's future.
It should also embrace the region's core grouping, ASEAN.
As I have said before, ASEAN, given its positive history and its contribution for the future, should be very much at the core of any future Asia Pacific community.
Second, an Asia Pacific community must be able to traverse all of the major questions that affect our region - political, economic, and strategic.
The challenges and opportunities that affect our futures are increasingly indivisible.
If they ever existed, the days when problems or opportunities could be neatly compartmentalised as political, or economic or strategic, have gone.
The world, and our region certainly, are much more complicated, connected and integrated than that.
Take the regional economic crisis of the late 1990s, for example.
What began as a banking crisis in one country quickly became an economic crisis in others.
And from an economic crisis, it morphed into a social and employment crisis.
For some, it developed into a political crisis.
We need a mechanism that draws these threads together, and allows us to act on all fronts, in an integrated way, where possible anticipating developments rather than simply reacting to crises - and doing so with an increasing sense of regional community.
We can no longer afford to have the interests of the region dealt with in separate silos.
It might have worked for the 20th century.
But it does not work in the joined up world of the 21st century.
Third, an Asia Pacific community must shape the habits of transparency, trust and foster the instinct of cooperation.
The community we seek must, from its outset, embrace the values that will be essential for our region's strong future.
It must operate as a vehicle for openness about our prospects, our intentions and our challenges.
In doing so, we must be open with each other.
Fourth, an Asia Pacific community must meet at leaders' level.
Only leaders can traverse the breadth of fields across which our opportunities and challenges will be played out.
Only leaders can fully connect the economic and strategic, the environmental and the political.
Only leaders can bring the strategic dimension to thinking that will be needed to manage the challenges that are likely to confront us.
As Dick Woolcott found during his consultations, there is widespread recognition that none of our existing regional bodies, as currently configured, meets all these criteria..
There is no institution that has either the membership or the mandate to address the full spectrum of challenges facing the region: economic, political, strategic and environmental.
We should also take this opportunity to consider what an APc should not be.
Other regions can provide us with useful models, but our region is unique.
It is clear to me that, unlike the EU, we do not need a supra-national decision making structure.
It is equally clear to me that we do not need an additional institution to add to the many which already populate the region's architecture.
We certainly cannot ask the leaders of the region to add a further meeting to their already heavy schedules.
Instead, we need to begin to discuss how to evolve an Asia-Pacific region from our existing regional institutions - rather than try to start completely afresh - particularly given the excellent work already done by our wider pan-regional institutions and their in-built and demonstrated capacity to adapt to changing needs.
Let us therefore consider together where we could go from here for the future.
I would like to lay out some options for you to consider, in the current jargon, the 'glide paths' that we could use.
We can of course, do nothing - but that would expose us to the weaknesses that have been identified in our current architecture.
Another approach (as noted above) would be to build entirely new institutions from the ground up - in other words we could add a new body purpose-built to be able to manage the emerging challenges we have identified.
But there was a clear feeling during Dick Woolcott's consultations that adding to the number of meetings that leaders around the region have to attend, or adding to the already long list of regional meetings for officials is not the preferred way forward.
The alternative, or third way, would be to build an APc using some of the architecture that the region already has at hand - the key elements of which are APEC, EAS and the ARF.
Could APEC evolve, over time, to meet the needs of an APc?
To do so, it would need to take on a more defined security mandate.
And of course it would need to bring in India - a nation that will be a key player in the future of our region in the decades ahead.
Alternatively, is the East Asia Summit the natural building block for the architecture we seek?
Perhaps the East Asia Summit - a still evolving body - could expand and develop to take on a broader role.
Its membership would need to increase to include other key players.
President Obama's recent remarks that that America will look to deepen its engagement with the EAS could be part of a move in this direction.
Another alternative would be to look at somehow bringing the key existing bodies - APEC and EAS - together, which would bring with it the benefit of a single leaders meeting or cluster of meetings.
This could be extended - by merging the wider range of regional bodies to fuse together the political, economic and security agendas that confront our region.
The ASEAN Regional Forum was established specifically to deal with security challenges.
It filled an obvious void in the region.
But I would argue that its membership is too large to conceive of the ARF becoming established at leaders' level.
I recognise that there will be different views about these possible "glide paths" to a future regional architecture.
But I hope they offer a useful platform for your thinking.
Let me explain what I hope the role of this conference will be.
At the most fundamental level, this conference will continue the conversation that was begun eighteen months ago.
The conference will hear contrasting, and probably opposing, points of view.
That is a good thing.
I welcome the debate that the diversity of the group participating here will bring.
Without that debate, we cannot find the synthesis that we need.
But I hope that you will be able to settle on some ideas, some principles that will guide our way forward.
That is my challenge to you over the next day and a half.
You are the experts on foreign policy and regional organisations from around our region and beyond.
You have gathered here for a conference with a clear purpose.
Your mission - led by Dick Woolcott, Michael Wesley and Madame Ninh - is to answer some key questions.
First, what do we want?
Second, how might we get there?
I am not actually expecting the final answers by Saturday lunch time.
But I do expect to that at the end of this conference we will have some notion of what we want to do for the future of our region.
I also hope that you will find a mechanism to continue the conversation in a constructive way.
It is a major task.
I believe it is an important and urgent task.
And look forward to receiving the chairpersons' report on your deliberations and on the most constructive way forward.
That is why we have gathered you - with all the experience and expertise that you bring - to discuss, debate and describe the future of our region, so that we might all work together to shape the future to deliver stability, security and prosperity for all our peoples and all our nations in what will become the century of the Asia Pacific.