Carr - Diary of a Foreign Minister

Diary of a
Foreign
Minister

BOB
CARR

Diary of a
Foreign
Minister

As always, to H, my co-conspirator.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Bob Carr 2014

First published 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Carr, Bob, 1947 author.

Title: Diary of a foreign minister/Bob Carr.

ISBN: 9781742234175(hardback)

9781742241708(ePub)

9781742246741(ePDF)

Subjects: Carr, Bob, 1947 Diaries.

Foreign ministers Australia Biography.

Politicians Australia Biography.

Australia Politics and government.

Australia Foreign relations.

Dewey Number: 327.940092

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Xou Creative

Front cover image Photograph by Lisa Maree Williams, Getty Images

Back cover images Photographs by Mark Graham, Trevor Collens and Yuri Gripas;

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

There comes a time when you realise that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

James Salter, All That Is (2013)

PREFACE

Its the end of the drama. The results are in.

Theres a single character standing on the stage.

Its 1993, Helena and I are in London at a performance by the National Theatre of David Hares The Absence of War. Watching, spellbound. After all, Im Opposition Leader in the New South Wales parliament and this is a play about a Labour opposition leader in the UK, based on Neil Kinnock. And his fate.

Hes lost the election. He gives up the leadership and now he speaks direct to the audience, reflecting on the bruising experience:

I found myself asking a question which will always haunt us and to which no easy answer appears.

Is this history? Is everything history? Could we have done more? Was it possible? And how shall we know?

The stage directions require the company to remain frozen as the lights fade and the music swells.

These are questions anyone can ask, at the end.

Was it history?

Is everything?

Could we have done more?

***

Six years after I retired as Premier of New South Wales, Sam Dastyari, then secretary of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party, and his assistant secretary, Chris Minns, came into my office and said, We have an idea. It was an idea suggested by a new planetary alignment, something unusual: a vacancy for Foreign Minister and a vacancy for Labor senator from New South Wales. Here was a possibility I could return to politics as Australias Foreign Minister, although with the high likelihood I would hold the job for a mere eighteen months. Another Prime Minister might have shrunk from inviting a former Premier aboard. Julia Gillard did not.

I see life as a learning experience and it would be hard very hard to deny oneself this. I got on board, signing up for the duration.

Six months later, in September 2012 during Leaders Week at the United Nations, advisers and I walked up First Avenue towards the UN headquarters at One United Nations Plaza. Autumn was settling. There were scudding clouds, wind in the air. Facing the UN, blocked off behind a massive police presence, was a big demonstration chanting under the direction of a leader with a megaphone.

His voice was high-pitched, the crowds response in rhythm, the total effect mesmeric:

Shame, shame, Ban Ki-moon.

Shame on the nations of the world.

The phrase the nations of the world lodged in my prefrontal cortex like a shard of glass. The peoples of our battered planet are organised into nations. Foreign policy is to see that these the nations of the world avoid going to war and manage some level of cooperation.

The nations of the world.

Whats foreign policy, if not the conduct of all this?

In meetings at the UN I will seek the support of a majority of the nations of the world to place Australia on the Security Council for a two-year term. I will talk to them all: the old friends and our obvious partners as well as the small island states, the nations of the Caribbean, the nations of the Pacific and of the African world. Their response will be shaped by how they see Australias international personality.

There is a catastrophic descent into civil war in Syria and many of its twenty-two million people are suffering. Yet there seems no available mechanism for giving expression to the principle of Responsibility to Protect, endorsed here at the UN General Assembly in 2005.

Beyond the UN agenda the multilateral arena there is a debate within Australias leadership about our approaches to China and the United States. Three former Australian prime ministers Fraser, Hawke and Keating and some business figures and academic commentators say that in 2011 Australia tilted away from China. This is part of a wider discussion among nations in the region about how we will adjust to the phenomenon of the age: the re-emergence of China. And this re-emergence of China is part of a larger narrative about the shift of economic clout and strategic weight to Asia.

In Canberra the supporters of Kevin Rudd are unlikely to accept his departure from the cabinet that resulted in me taking his post and becoming Foreign Minister. Behind the tensions between him and Julia Gillard there lies a larger anxiety about the competence of a government lacking a majority in the House of Representatives. To me, party ethos and leadership quality are at the core. Beyond this sits an even more fundamental question: whether the Australian Labor Party, like other social democratic parties, is in long-term structural decline.

We enter the foyer of the General Assembly. Foreign ministers followed by flocks of self-important officials, cutting across the public space like migratory waterfowl, as we convene the nations of the world. Due to a political fluke Im now part of this fraternity, the Foreign Ministers Club, which consumes such time and energy and may sometimes yield results.

In total it will be eighteen months to test what propositions hold, what fall by the wayside.

And to decide whether it was history.

MONDAY, APRIL 9, 2012
Sydney to New York

Okay, in my next life I return as a bon vivant, gourmet and imbiber.

Breakfast of croissants lathered with tangy French butter and bitter marmalade; outsize cups of caramel-coloured black coffee; fried eggs and burnt-to-a-crisp bacon. Buoyed through the day with heavily watered whisky and a pint of champagne, in the Churchillian manner. Getting off a train or plane, exhaling fumes of Pol Roger, waving around a cigar dunked in cognac. A bowler hat held aloft a silver-topped cane. Flushed and merry.

A pre-lunch gin while a bottle from Cte de Nuits breathes on a table, and the crisp tablecloth being set with asparagus in hollandaise sauce and snails with garlic and butter; the beef bourguignon whirled in potatoes sauted in duck fat; even a plate of snout, udders, brains and tongue.