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Speaker 1: Bec Strating, Director of La Trobe Asia
Good morning and welcome to the Maritime Cooperation Forum Conference at the 2024 Asian Australia Special Summit. My name is Bek Strating. I'm the director of La Trobe Asia and Latrobe University here in Melbourne. And it is my great honour to be convening today’s conference and welcoming you all here this morning. It is so wonderful to see so many old friends and hopefully new friends here in the room today. We will begin the proceedings with a video message from the Prime Minister of Australia, the honourable Anthony Albanese MP.
Speaker 2: Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese MP
Friends, welcome to Australia. It is an honour to welcome you to the ASEAN Australia Special Summit in Melbourne. Australia's proud to be ASEAN’s first and oldest dialogue partner. This year marks the 50th year of our partnership. It is an opportunity to reflect on how far we've come, on the strength of our enduring relationship, and on our vision for the future. Australia's connection with ASEAN has founded on our strong people-to-people bonds, our deep economic links and our shared vision for a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo Pacific. I look forward to a great summit and to working together to build a partnership for the future.
Speaker 1: Bec Strating, Director of La Trobe Asia
I would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. It is very exciting to have the region’s foremost maritime experts here with us today from across academia, think tanks and government. The Maritime Cooperation Forum is significant for a number of reasons, of course. It marks 50 years of dialogue partnership between ASEAN and Australia and 50 years of growing cooperation on shared regional maritime challenges. It also brings together regional experts in all aspects of the maritime domain, from maritime law and governance, to security, to the blue economy, marine ecology and biodiversity, and maritime connectivity, and this is the first dedicated forum between ASEAN and Australia on maritime cooperation.
What a way to ensure stability, security and prosperity for the next 50 years of our partnership, and to celebrate the last 50 years, by holding this forum within this 2024 ASEAN Australia Special Summit. Now before we begin with our keynote speakers, I would note that media will be present through today's conference. The keynote addresses will be broadcast live, and I will share some information on the rest of today's programme following our keynote addresses.
We are very privileged to be joined today by two distinguished foreign policy leaders, Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator, the Honourable Penny Wong and Philippine Secretary for Foreign Affairs, honourable Enrique Manalo. Please join me in welcoming Minister Wong and Secretary Manalo to the stage.
Minister Wong is no stranger to many of you here, given her frequent travel to Southeast Asia since becoming foreign minister in May 2022. Even prior to taking Office, Minister Wong was a frequent presence in the region in her role as shadow foreign Minister from 2016. Minister Wong was previously Minister for Finance and Deregulation and Australia's First Minister for Climate change. On top of her ministerial responsibilities, Minister Wong is leader of the government in the Senate and has been a proud South Australian senator since 2002. Please welcome the senator, the honourable Penny Wong, to deliver her keynote address.
Speaker 3: Penny Wong, Minister for Foreign Affairs
Thank you very much Professor. Starting can I first acknowledge also the traditional owners of this land, the Wurunjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to elders past and present. Can I first acknowledge my friend and fellow speaker, the Philippines Foreign Secretary Manalo? It's wonderful to share the stage with you, to welcome you to Australia and we thank you for the very impressive and successful contribution of your leader to our Parliament last week.
I also acknowledge Laos, this year's ASEAN chair and Australia's ASEAN Country Coordinator. I want to thank our friends from Laos for your guidance and support as we prepared for this special summit. Want to start first with the Philippines and say again how honoured we were to welcome President Marcos to Canberra last week to deliver an address to the Australian Parliament. Our countries share a long friendship and partnership, and the formal elevation of our ties to a strategic partnership, announced by Prime Minister Albanese and President Marcos last year, is a reflection of not only our already deep ties, but the enormous potential to grow our relationship either even further. The Philippines, of course, is a founding member of ASEAN. And ASEAN was still in its infancy some 50 years ago, our visionary Prime Minister Gough Whitlam recognised as them was already central to managing the region’s challenges and he could see that it would only become more central. So he enthusiastically pursued engagement with ASEAN and we became the first non-member to establish formal relations when Prime Minister Whitlam signed Australia up as ASEAN’s first dialogue partner. Prime Minister Whitlam knew that while much of our history might have been in Europe, our home and our future are in our region. He recognised the role Southeast Asia would play in Australia's destiny and in the destiny of the world, and in turn he saw Australia as a true participant in the destiny of the region. And as always, thinking about the future, he said, “There can be no turning back from this commitment.”
Well, he's been proven right, because that early engagement soon paved the way towards an annual ASEAN Australia Foreign Ministers meeting, which I have had the privilege of participating in. And our engagement has grown to a comprehensive strategic partnership between ASEAN and Australia. The formalisation of our permanent commitment to ASEAN centrality, the formalisation of a truth. That Australia doesn't just acknowledge. We embrace. We share a region and we share a future. We are bound by the geography that fate has chosen for us and we are strengthened by the partnership we choose for ourselves, our nations and our peoples, all benefit from the peace, stability and security we build together. And we all benefit as each of us succeeds and thrives. Our belief in shared success underpins our commitment to increased economic partnership. At the ASEAN summit in Jakarta last September, our Prime Minister launched, invested Australia's South East economic strategy to 2040. This strategy, crafted by one of Australia's most successful business leaders, Nicholas Moore, maps opportunities for trade and investment. How Australian and South East Asian business and government can work together to boost our economic engagement and to build shared prosperity.
At the business track of this week's special summit, we will discuss with one hundred CEOs and hundreds of business enterprises how we can continue to turn that strategy into action and substantially boost trade and investment to all of our benefit. Shared prosperity is an incentive to maintain peace. Yet it is not enough to guarantee peace. The stakes are clear. We know that a major conflict in our region would be devastating to our communities and economies as the terrible conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have shown. So we all have a responsibility to shape the regio we want. The region we want to share: peaceful, stable and prosperous. A region in balance, where each country can pursue its own aspirations, where no country dominates and no country is dominated.
Maintaining this character is a continued and continuous process. It requires us all to nurture and protect agreed rules, to uphold international law, to prevent conflict, and to build strategic trust. This is more important than ever, with the region's character under challenge. President Marcos said to the Australian parliament last week, “Geopolitical polarities and strategic competitions threaten our hard-won peace, even as we remain beset by unresolved inequities and inequalities within and amongst nations.” We see this in many ways. We see claims and actions that are inconsistent with international law, particularly with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the legal order for the seas and the oceans. We face, destabilising provocative and coercive actions, including unsafe conduct at sea and in the air and militarisation of disputed features. We know that military power is expanding, but measures to constrain military conflict are not, and there are few concrete mechanisms for averting it. So these factors give rise to the most strategic, most confronting circumstances in our region for decades. Australia welcomes the December statement by ASEAN Foreign Ministers, which expressed concerns about developments that threaten regional peace and security in the maritime sphere. The statement reiterated the reiterated the need for dialogue, restraint and the peaceful resolution of disputes in accordance with international law, particularly on costs. And the need for building trust and confidence, which itself requires transparency and restraint and the importance of regular dialogue between China and the United States.
Australia supports this approach and we play our part in advocating for peace. Since I became foreign Minister, I've consistently reiterated US calls for open lines of communication with China and said it was in all of our interests for these overtures to be met. So we welcome the resumption of leader level and military level dialogue between the United States and China. These are important steps on the path towards stability that the region has called for. We must also commit to preventive architecture to increase resilience and to reduce the risk of conflict through miscalculation or misunderstanding.
And this isn't just about the great powers. Australia listened carefully to Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong when he said last year, “This rivalry affects every country and region in the world. And the risk of accidents and miscalculation is ever present, especially in dangerous hotspots like the Taiwan Strait. This worries Asian countries a lot. We are close to Ground Zero.” This situation requires all of requires all of us to shape habits of cooperation that sustain the character of our region. To insist that differences are managed through dialogue, not force. To insist that communication never be withheld as punishment or offered as reward. We want to support ASEAN member states to ensure collectively we all have the practical tools we need to be able to rapidly and effectively deescalate tensions and crises. In January, Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia co-hosted an ASEAN track two workshop on conflict prevention and the ASEAN-led regional architecture, where academics from all ASEAN member states and partners put forward creative and practical recommendations to enhance Asians conflict prevention capacity. And we are heartened by the extensive work being taken forward by many Member States, such as the recent agreements between the Philippines and Vietnam on maritime cooperation and on preventing and managing incidents.
These investments in diplomacy are all contributing to build coalitions, to foster assurance, to reduce tensions and contribute to strategic balance. Alongside these efforts to reassure, reducing the risk of conflict also requires deterrence. And Australia is transparently investing in capable in a capable military defence industry and partnerships to continue to be a reliable security partner for the region. Our long-standing defence partnerships in the region, including with ASEAN Member States, build not only interoperability, they build friendships and they build understanding.
Together we show the high costs for anyone seeking to provoke conflict. We are an active member of Ocean's defence architecture, including through the ADMM-Plus Experts Working Group on maritime security. Because the ASEAN Maritime Outlook and ASEAN outlook on the Indo Pacific are right to recognise that the waters of South East Asia are among the most strategic maritime domains in the world. And the maritime domain is at the heart of our shared interests. It is also at the heart of our shared prosperity. And so we welcome ASEAN's first joint maritime military exercise, Asian Solidarity Exercise 2023, which demonstrates its capacity for collective action and mutual support. The countries of our region rely on oceans, seas and rivers for livelihoods and for commerce, including free and open sea lanes in the South China Sea. The ASEAN Charter and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in South East Asia both set norms for the region and for our approach to preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention, including in the maritime space.
So Australia is working with ASEAN to increase resilience to coercion and to ensure waterways that serve us all remain open and accessible. Which is why I am pleased to announce that we will commit a further $64 million over the next four years, including $40 million in new funding to enhance Australia's South East Asia Maritime Partnerships. This will expand our maritime cooperation and contribute to peace, prosperity and the management of maritime domains within the region. I also welcome recent comments from Indonesian President Widodo, who said we also have a responsibility to lower the tension, to melt the ice to create space, for dialogue, to bridge the differences. We support efforts to use norms, rules and principles to enhance maritime stability, and we welcome efforts by Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines to delimit their maritime boundaries in accordance with UNCLOS.
As a long standing and trusted maritime partner for ASEAN and its members, Australia has delivered law of the sea training across ASEAN and Member States and co-hosted Asian workshops on maritime issues and on conflict prevention. Last week, President Marcos and Prime Minister Albanese reinforced our commitment to conduct maritime cooperative activities in support of regional security and stability. We also signed a Memorandum of Understanding to enhance maritime cooperation in our region. We will continue to work with the region to protect and secure maritime and riverine resources and environments, whether to map coral reefs to prevent illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing or to safeguard freshwater resources from climate change in the Mekong. I'm also pleased to announce a further $22 and a half million dollars continuing Australia's long-term commitment to supporting resilience in the Mekong sub-region. A second phase of the Mekong-Australia Partnership will build on our existing partnerships to invest in water security climate change resilience, combating transnational crime and strengthening sub regional leadership.
Friends, in conclusion, I make these points. What happens in the South China Sea, in the Taiwan Strait, in the Mekong sub region, across the Indo Pacific, affects us all. Australia will always seek our security within the security of our region. We recognise ASEAN centrality is the key to the region's stability and security. So we are committed to supporting ASEAN’s leadership. We recognise and respect the strength of ASEAN's collective voice, which resonates throughout the region when it speaks of its view. Of the importance of rules and of sovereignty. Our region comprises different political systems. But we share a common interest in maintaining open and transparent communication. These habits of communication, these norms of cooperation, these underpin the character of our region. Never underestimate the capacity of norms to underpin the character of a region and of ASEAN’s role in enabling and buttressing those norms. And it is a character that we wish to preserve, free from coercion or threat of force. So for all of these reasons, I am pleased with my friend Enrique to open this Maritime Cooperation Forum today. It is an opportunity for Australia and for ASEAN, for officials and academics, to advance our shared economic security and environmental interest in a stable maritime sphere and to develop new ideas to support ASEAN’s maritime vision. All states, big and small, have a stake in these issues and all must be a part of their solution. Friends, our challenges are vast and I encourage participants to be bold. As all our governments must be bold. Because nothing less than the peace and prosperity of our region is at stake. Thank you very much.