Building on ASEAN's Success: Towards an Asia Pacific Community

2. Building on ASEAN's Success: Towards an Asia-Pacific Community

II Building on ASEAN’s Success: Towards an Asia-Pacific Community Kevin Rudd Deputy Prime Minister Professor Jayakumar; other Singapore Ministers; Mr Yong Pung How, Council of Presidential Advisers; Members of the Singapore Parliament; Mr Wong Ah Long, Deputy Chairman of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies; Ambassador Kesavapany, Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies; other Distinguished Guests; Members of the diplomatic corps — including High Commissioners Albert Chua and Miles Kupa; Ladies and Gentlemen. INTRODUCTION When I arrived in Singapore this morning, the first place I visited was the Kranji War Cemetery. There is no more permanent reminder of the connection between Australia and Singapore than that sacred place. More than 2,500 Australians are buried at Kranji or are remembered on the Singapore Memorial to the Missing. These brave Australians do not lie alone. 5 Together with the Australians are honoured many thousands of others, including at Kranji some 2,700 British, 670 Indians and many others who gave their lives also for the defence of this island. And those that survived the battle of Singapore then had to go on and endure horror and hardship as prisoners of war. I thank the Government of Singapore for continuing to honour their memory. And it is for these great reasons that Singapore has always occupied a special place in the hearts of Australians. For Australians, military ties with Singapore are not just a matter of distant history. They have been alive through the Emergency, through Konfrontasi, and more recently through the Five Power Defence Arrangements. And they continue to inform the present as well as shape the future. Most recently, our defence forces have worked together in East Timor. And they will soon be working together in Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan. Time after time, we also find ourselves side by side in military operations, in peacekeeping operations and in humanitarian operations — as in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. 6 Security, defence and peacekeeping cooperation has been a fundamental, continuing part of our relationship. Part of a wider relationship between our two countries which I believe is welcomed by both our governments. It is, therefore, a great pleasure to be back in Singapore. And I want to thank the Government of Singapore for extending to me the honour of giving the Singapore Lecture. My purpose in this lecture is to outline our thinking on the possible shape of our region in the future in a rapidly changing world. And, furthermore, how we might together respond to the new challenges that these changes will create if we are to maximize our common goals of security, prosperity and sustainability for the wider region. All the more important at the dawn of what will become the Asia-Pacific century – as the centre of geo-strategic and geoeconomic gravity progressively shifts to our own region. With this shift comes great responsibility. A responsibility to ensure that this century of Asia and the Pacific remains truly pacific as previous centuries of Europe and the Atlantic have not. The changes and the challenges we face are therefore great indeed. 7 ThE TRANSNATIONAl SCOPE Of ThE ChAllENgE Dealing with the challenges of a more integrated world means understanding both the limitations of the state and the limitations of markets — and embracing cooperative solutions to global challenges. Challenges which lie beyond the reach of any single nation state — however powerful. For example, climate change is the consequence of the failure of free markets to adequately account for pollution externalities. Similarly, the recent international financial turbulence was precipitated by too little effective regulation, not too much. The gathering challenges of energy, water and food security reveal the need for long-term management of these critical global resources — recognizing price realities as a product of scarcity while equally recognizing macro challenges of energy and water shortages and their impact on adequate food supply. And one of the major security threats of the 21st century thus far — terrorism — has revealed itself to be diffuse, elusive and no respecter of national boundaries and largely immune to the polarized geopolitics of the Cold War era. We can say confidently that none of the major contemporary global challenges can be addressed by a retreat into isolationism or unilateralism. Today’s global challenges therefore derive from a diverse mix of market failures, ineffective regulation, and inadequate international  institutional frameworks to deal with what most of us would regard as genuinely global...