The purpose is to encourage the development of a genuine and comprehensive sense of community whose habitual operating principle is cooperation.

The danger in not acting is that we run the risk of succumbing to the perception that future conflict within our region may somehow be inevitable.

At present none of our existing regional mechanisms as currently configured are capable of achieving these purposes.

That is why the new Australian Government argues that we should now begin the regional debate about where we want to be in 2020.

Such a debate does not of itself mean the diminution of any of the existing regional bodies.

APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit, ASEAN Plus Three and ASEAN itself will continue to play important roles, and longer-term may continue in their own right or embody the building blocks of an Asia Pacific Community.

There will be wide ranging views about this across the region – some more supportive than others.

New bodies and new ideas will continue to emerge.

Australia would welcome the evolution of the Six Party Talks into a wider regional body to discuss confidence and security building measures in North East Asia and beyond – and we support the United States in this.

I would also argue that an Asia Pacific Community by 2020 is consistent with President Bush’s call for the development of a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific – an ambition we have consistently supported as a long-term goal.

The European Union of course does not represent an identikit model of what we would seek to develop in the Asia Pacific.

He also flags exploration of the ideas through a special mission by Dick Woolcott ‘to finish his unfinished business’ in his work for the establishment of APEC.

APEC encompasses Australia’s strategic interests in the economic and political relations between East Asia and North America and its design is built to cope with the huge transition in economic and political power that has and will take place in the region for many years to come.

The Prime Minister’s address and its argument opens up many doors and raises some leading questions about where Australia should put its bets in the competition among regional cooperation arrangements in Asia and the Pacific.

Mr Rudd says that what we need to think about what sort of regional arrangements we need in 2020 not where we are at now. There is no question about that. Wherever we are in 2020, the chances are that China, India, Japan and Southeast Asia will be there with us and if there are not effective regional cooperation arrangements that include us and all four, regional politics and economics are likely to be more difficult to manage.

The aim is to draw India in, but the trans-Pacific enterprise is unlikely to be able to build the sub-structure of cooperation that the rising Asian states will need even if all the big ones are members of APEC.

Can the regional arrangements that are in place now fill the forward gap on political- security dialogue (the unspecified elephant in his speech) and reduce the risk of instability around the changing balance of political power?

The East Asian Summit (EAS), with the involvement of China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia and Australasia has potential to provide ballast in the re-alignment of Asian economic and political power.

From one perspective, the EAS, premised on a mutual security understanding and with its heads of government meetings, might serve as a forum for regional political and security dialogue.

However, the US is not a member of EAS and it is unlikely that the US would be to accept membership.

APEC, which includes America, also meets at heads of government level, and has steadily widened the scope of its dialogue to include human security issues, is a natural forum for high level, if informal political and security dialogue. However, India is not a member, the membership is broad and Taiwan’s membership is a complication.

Another suggestion is to build high level political security dialogues around the Six-Party talks process in Northeast Asia. At one level this will be important but at another it would be inadequate and not inclusive of Southeast Asian and Australasian interests.

ARF also serves an important confidence-building function but is not readily directed to filling this gap.

There is a range of options that would allow the difficulties to be handled and that deserve further in-depth exploration:

• one suggestion was to back-to-back EAS and APEC;
• another was to establish the conditions for India’s membership of APEC;
• a start in Asia Pacific Community building could be made through informal meetings around APEC when Asia Pacific heads of government get together.

Asia still does not have a caucus in which the priority is how to deal collectively with the rest of the world’s responses to Asia. That is a major weakness in the value of regional arrangements for managing the big trade, financial, environmental and political issues of the day. EAS might be energized for that purpose.

The main game in region that deals us and the big four in Asia all in is the East Asian Summit or ASEAN + 6 group. Rudd’s speech did not canvass the diplomatic energy that needs to be put in to make EAS work in Australia’s and the region’s interests immediately alongside the longer term Asia Pacific enterprise.

That is the next priority. We won’t get regional structures we need in 2020 if we don’t take account of the access and the foundations that we have to begin with.