I called on Foreign Minister Julie Bishop this morning to touch base before she headed off to the NATO Summit in Newport, Wales, later this week. Australia has worked very closely with NATO and played an important role as the largest non-NATO contributor in the Afghanistan campaign. This relationship will not end with the campaign but be strengthened through an enhanced partnership with NATO.
This NATO meeting is the largest gathering of international leaders the UK has ever hosted, attended by 68 countries and international organisations. It comes at a particularly crucial time with the draw-down from a long campaign in Afghanistan, where British and Australian troops paid a heavy sacrifice in human lives, and against the backdrop of the current violence in Ukraine and elsewhere. The shooting down of MH17 with 38 Australians on board showed that, in a networked world, countries can be significantly impacted by conflicts well beyond their immediate neighbourhood. That is why it is so important to work closely together on issues that threaten our security, reflected in the summit title “Stronger together: Building stability in an unpredictable world.”
The emergence of Australian “foreign fighters” in Iraq and Syria, personified in those tragic images we have all seen on our TV screens in recent weeks, is another reminder of how global threats canbecome domestic. Sadly, the foreign fighter issue is something the UK has become all too familiar with. Just last week, the Home Secretary raised our domestic security threat status. This means heightened vigilance, but should certainly not discourage the one million Australian tourists, business people and students who visit Britain every year.
In our discussion of some of the very serious challenges faced by the international community, there was one light moment. The Melbourne Cup, which will be competed for in Australia’s most famous horse race on 4 November, was doing the rounds of Parliament. The Foreign Minister and I each had to don one white glove before we were allowed to touch the hallowed trophy: it was like being in a Michael Jackson video.