Speech at the launch of the
Australian Bishops’
Social Justice Sunday Statement 2007
Who is My Neighbour?
Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
Given by
Dr Michael Fullilove
Director, Global Issues Program
Lowy Institute for International Policy
Mary MacKillop Place, North Sydney
17 September 2007
Bishop Christopher Saunders, Elsie Heiss, Fr Frank Brennan, John Ferguson, ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks, Chris, for the generous introduction. You even managed to fit in an ad for my book, which was much appreciated as I could not, in good conscience, have plugged my own book while I was launching another!
I’m delighted to be here at Mary MacKillop Place today to launch the 2007 Social Justice Sunday Statement, Who is my neighbour? Australia’s role as a global citizen.
I’m pleased to be here for a couple of reasons. I know this place pretty well. My family attends Mass at the chapel next door and Fr Paul Coleman is a good friend. When the new extension to Mount Street was built in the mid-1990s I was on the staff of Prime Minister Keating, and I accompanied Mrs Keating here for the opening.
As a Catholic I’ve sat in many congregations listening to many priests, so I could hardly knock back an opportunity to deliver a sermon to a room full of clergy – including a bishop, no less! This is one for the laypeople.
Finally, I’m happy to be present because I support the intent and the spirit of the document that we are launching today. I’m told that this Statement will be available at every church door in the country on Social Justice Sunday and priests in every corner of the continent will be encouraged to address it in their services.
Sometimes in my business, in foreign policy, there’s a sense that foreign policy is technical and difficult stuff which should be left to the experts – to the secular clerisy of officials and people like me – rather than being opened up to the laypeople. Sometimes people say foreign policy is too important for domestic political discussion. I believe the exact opposite: foreign policy is too important to be excluded from domestic political discussion.
There should be an open conversation on international affairs and the Australian people should be invited to participate. That was the idea behind the establishment of the Lowy Institute for International Policy – and that same belief animates the document that we launch today. I’m grateful to Fr Frank Brennan for inviting me to help with that task.
The title of the Statement is Who is my neighbour?, and, as we have heard, it is taken from the lawyer’s question to Jesus, described in Luke’s Gospel. It is not for me to preach the gospel before this assembly but perhaps the Bishop and Fr Frank will forgive me if I relate the parable.
The lawyer accepts that he is subject to the Commandment to love his neighbour, but he asks the reasonable question: who is that neighbour?
And Jesus tells his famous parable about the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance a priest came that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And a Levite, too, looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him, and paid the innkeeper to look after him once he had moved on.
The parable of the Good Samaritan makes a bold statement. It provides a very broad definition of our neighbours, and of our duty to them.
And similarly this Statement makes a bold claim: it says we should consider not just the national interest – which is the mainstay of my field of international relations – but the neighbours’ interest.
This would be a brave demand at any time, because history tells us that neighbouring countries are often at each others’ throats. The two world wars began, in large part, as wars between neighbours.
In peacetime, too, interstate rivalry is often at its sharpest between neighbours. In the recent debate to expand the UN Security Council, for instance, the opposition to any particular state’s candidacy was almost always led by a neighbour or other regional power who felt its prerogatives and its prestige would be diminished by the other’s promotion.
So this Statement would be brave at any point in time – but it is particularly brave now, because when it comes to foreign policy, values are out of vogue. These days everyone is a realist.
The general view is that we tried mixing morality with foreign policy – and that attempt was called the Bush Doctrine. In his first term President Bush’s foreign policy involved the interrelated concepts of pre-emption, unilateralism and regime change, but the unifying theme was the imposition of freedom through force. An explicit link was drawn between values and coercion. Most liberals were uncomfortable with this connection, and its application in the case of Iraq. They understood that democracy is a blessing that requires patient nurturing over many years; rarely can it be imposed by force of arms on a population traumatised by decades of vicious and totalitarian rule. But some liberals supported the Iraq war because, notwithstanding their aversion to Washington’s methods, they believed it was their neighbourly duty to introduce Iraqis to freedom.
The balance sheet on Iraq is now pretty clear: it was a mistake. Yes, a murderous tyrant who brought suffering down on the heads of his people was ousted. But the country is in a wretched state; the fabled weapons of mass destruction did not materialise; the jihadist fire has been fuelled, not smothered; the Middle East has been reordered only to the extent that Iran has been strengthened and emboldened; and our ally the United States has weakened itself considerably.
As a result, the pendulum has swung back in favour of the realists, who argue that the system works best for all concerned when states pursue their rational self-interest. They insist that banging the drum on values is tantamount to naivety or arrogance. Order should be privileged over justice. If morality has a role, they say, it is the morality of prudence.
This is yet another of the unfortunate consequences of the foolhardy Iraq war: it squeezed values out of the foreign policy debate. Certainly, policy makers should approach their task with care and humility. They ought to take the physician’s dictum as their own: ‘First, do no harm.’ But that doesn’t mean that our foreign policy should be values-free. The foreign policy of a democratic country such as Australia can never be values-free. A broad definition of ‘neighbourliness’ is inscribed on the cortex of most Australians regardless of their religious beliefs. It should be reflected in our international policies no less than our health or welfare policies.
It’s not always easy, however, to agree on the policy form our neighbourliness should take. Let me mention two tough examples. The first is the use of force. Some on the left are inclined to oppose all wars. We now think of the first Gulf War as ‘the good war’ in contrast to the Iraq war – but that’s not how it seemed at the time. Tens of thousands of Australians marched against the 1991 war because of the violence that would be done to ordinary Iraqis, whom they saw as their neighbours. Similarly many Australians who opposed NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 were motivated less by the lack of UN Security Council approval than by the knowledge that its most terrible effects would be felt by ordinary men, women and children, rather than Slobodan Milosevic. I respectfully disagree. I believe both those wars were right. Sometimes avoiding the difficult option amounts to passing by on the other side. Sometimes you have to do a lesser evil to prevent a greater evil.
Let me end with the example of capital punishment. The Australian Government is opposed to capital punishment and we engage in modest advocacy against the death penalty, but most of Canberra’s efforts are directed towards cases involving Australian citizens. When it comes to foreigners, we tend to pass by on the other side. Situations involving Australians often do violence to bilateral relations – for example, the looming execution of Van Nguyen in 2005 led to calls from Australian commentators for trade and business sanctions against Singapore, and charges of hypocrisy being leveled against Australia in the Asian regional press. So we have a twofold problem: we are making little progress towards universal abolition, which is a bipartisan national policy; and our bilateral relationships are being damaged because of our perceived hypocrisy on the issue.
I believe that Australia should run a different kind of policy. Australian political leaders should be consistent in their rhetoric on the death penalty, whether it is the Bali Nine or the Bali bombers who are standing on the drop. Canberra should also take more purposeful steps towards abolition by working with other abolitionist states in the region, such as East Timor, Cambodia and the Philippines, to nudge retentionist states towards abolition.
Speaking plainly on the death penalty and initiating a regional coalition against it would increase our chances of making a difference. It would also disarm those regional critics who charge that Australia cares only about its own. In other words, it would be the right thing to do as well as the smart thing. It would serve the neighbours’ interest as well as the national interest.
Ladies and gentlemen,
This Statement makes the point that globalisation is knitting us together much more closely than ever before. It is cutting the cost of transport and communication – which means that it is increasing our circles of neighbours. We know more about what is happening to people in other countries. And I think that will increasingly bring these foreign policy issues – these difficult choices – into the Australian mainstream. It is up to each of us to exercise our conscience and work out what our duty to our neighbours demands of us. It is up to each of us to decide what balance we should strike between our neighbours’ interest and our national interest.
And in order to exercise our conscience we need a broad debate with many participants and lots of well-argued positions. For that reason I’m delighted to report that the Social Justice Sunday Statement 2007 is a very good document indeed – broad, interesting, well-researched, nuanced and accessible. Not everyone will agree with everything in it but it’s important that we hear it.
I congratulate the Statement’s authors, including Frank Brennan, the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council and the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. And I’m delighted to launch this year’s Social Justice Sunday Statement.
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