Australia is at risk of damaging its international standing because of its stance of climate change, former foreign affairs minister Bob Carr has warned.
On the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday Carr said it was “a very awkward moment for Australia” when immigration minister Peter Dutton was caught joking about rising sea levels in Pacific nations with then prime minister Tony Abbott.
“To have an Australian minister mock people facing an existential threat because of climate change is not the sort of good global behaviour I would expect from Australia,” he said.
The panel, made up of foreign affairs, diplomatic and human rights experts, warned of other risks to Australia’s standing and questioned the future of the relationship with the United States.
The Human Rights Law Centre’s director of advocacy, Emily Howie, warned that Australia’s international reputation was being damaged by “exporting very cruel asylum seeker policies abroad”.
“The real damage that’s been done in the last five years has been in the denigration of Australia’s relationship with the United Nations,” she said. “There’s some real work that needs to be done to mend that relationship.”
The Lowy Institute’s executive director Michael Fullilove said: “The dangers that flow from climate change are so great that I think we all need to get together and to drive more ambitious agreements in Paris. Doing that would not only be the right thing for [Malcolm] Turnbull but the popular thing.”
He said Australia was seen as a “curious spectacle” now as a consequence of the successive changes in leadership over the past five years.
Former Australian diplomat Alison Broinowski called for a more intelligent public debate about Australia’s place in the world.
“It’s been so absent ... Australians are engaged, Australians are intelligent, and we deserve to be treated better than that,” she said.
“If we’re not consulted on why we go to war then our democracy is faulty, and we will continue to find ourselves subject to captain’s picks of the kind that we’ve had since 2003.”
She urged a shift away from Australia’s heavy reliance on the United States, and the formation of stronger ties with a range of other state parties.
“The idea that we are protected by the United States from anything and everything is completely erroneous. It is becoming more erroneous because the United States is losing its grip on sole hegemonic power,” she said.
“We have fought numerous wars with America since 1945, and we haven’t won one.
If Australia is smart about its own interests ... then we need to think big, think omnidirectionally, think independently, think individually, with the United States as one of many friends.”
Fullilove said Australia should not “turn away from our ally”, but there were many opportunities to continue to foster a relationship with China.
“The [United States] alliance is in our interest ... that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a productive relationship with China, that we shouldn’t be ambitious when our interests overlap.”
