Per Capita’s 2026 John Cain Memorial Oration was delivered by Professor the Honourable Gareth Evans AC KC on Tuesday 22 September at the State Library of Victoria. Prof Evans spoke on the subject of good international citizenship. You can find the text of his Oration below.
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Good International Citizenship: Recapturing the Decency Dimension in Australian Foreign Policy
John Cain is one of the most unequivocally decent persons ever to have held Australian public office, and it’s a privilege to have been invited by Per Capita – an NGO which understands better than most what decency in public policy is all about – to give this annual oration in his honour.
I first became aware of John’s quality – his commitment to progressive values, humanitarian instincts, courage in taking on formidable political opponents and total incorruptibility – when watching at a distance the leadership role he played, with a group of Melbourne Labor dissidents, in working with Gough Whitlam to overturn the hopelessly-dysfunctional, dinosaur-Left then leadership of the Victorian Branch of the ALP, which had made the party unelectable not only in this State but nationally.
I came to know John well personally a little later, when we were appointed together by Lionel Murphy in 1975 to serve as inaugural members of the Australian Law Reform Commission, under the marvellously active and ebullient chairmanship of Justice Michael Kirby. Then a practising solicitor and executive member of the Law Council, he was a delight to work with, a model of sturdy common sense, high principle and passionate respect for human rights, qualities he later showed in abundance when he became Victorian state premier in the 1980s with a major, and largely successfully accomplished, reform agenda.
We can argue whether some of his long-serving predecessors or successors in that role should have their bronze statue, but there’s no question that John unequivocally deserved his. Modest to a fault, he would never have claimed to be a paragon of all the virtues. He could certainly be a bit dour and a bit stubborn, and it’s probably fair to say that his tastes were more ascetic than aesthetic. But on all the qualities that really matter in holders of high public office, John Cain has had few peers, then or now, and it is wonderful that his contribution to our public life should continue to be honoured with this annual Oration.
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As we look out today at the wider world around us –and it is on international rather than domestic issues that I will focus in these remarks – decency is not a quality in abundantly obvious supply. My pitch is simply that this really matters in the conduct of international affairs, and that it is time for Australia – not least in the context of our bid to be re-elected to the UN Security Council, to make this a central theme of our Prime Minister’s visit to New York this week. It is a perfect opportunity to bring back to centre-stage, in the conduct of our foreign policy, the concept that being and being seen to be a decent country, what I like to call a good international citizen, is a core national interest, ranking right up there alongside our traditional preoccupations with physical security and economic prosperity.
When I say that decency is not a quality in abundantly obvious supply in international affairs today, the leadership of the United States is manifestly Exhibit A. What most troubles me about Donald Trump, and I think should trouble all of us, is not just the dumb destructiveness of his assault on all that is best in the global economic and security order we have known since the end of World War II, an order from which just about everyone, not least the US itself, has benefited. It’s not just having as the current leader of the free world someone who seems not to believe in the free world nor want to lead it, treating as he does the world trade system as a freeloaders’ conspiracy against America; the UN and other international institutions as useless encumbrances on great power freedom of action; allies, too, as encumbrances rather than assets; and naked cross-border aggression as something to be tolerated if exercised within a great power’s sphere of influence.
Beyond all that, what I find just as troubling, and in many ways even more distasteful, about the current US President is his total abandonment of any sense of decency, whether it be at the personal, national or international level. There’s the narcissistic vulgarity of his personal language and behaviour. There’s his approach to governing the US domestically, with his contempt for free speech, democratic process, the courts and the constitution, immigrants, diversity and equity issues, and higher education. And, most immediately relevant to my main theme, there’s his approach to the conduct of international relations, where he seems not to begin to understand that the currency that matters most is not the crude and contemptuous exercise of raw national power, but respect and trust.
It is not unusual for political leaders to be narcissistic and self-absorbed, with a degree of self-belief defying normal human inhibition. But what matters above all, when it comes to what they can achieve in office, and how their legacy will be remembered, is whether their self-regard is matched by competence and essential decency. We’ve had some striking examples in Australia within living memory of non-shrinking-violets who make interesting case studies in this respect. I am thinking in particular of the four most notably larger-than-life leaders whom I’ve known well in recent decades: Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.
Bob Hawke’ love of everything about himself was legendary. And I mean everything, as those of us can attest who have had the pleasure of arriving at his hotel room late in the evening to brief him before some event to be greeted by the great man in his birthday suit. But self-absorbed as he was, Hawke did have decent values that were very real – not least an abiding passion for the underdog, a respect for his political opponents and a total commitment to a cooperative approach to problem-solving, all of which admirably served both the country and his legacy.
Paul Keating has been often accused of overweening arrogance, but I believe this was always more a function of self-confidence than Trumpian-style narcissism. And like Hawke, he was motivated by a very strong sense of decency in his approach to public-policy making – with that perhaps most prominently on display with his Redfern speech of 1992 empathetically apologising to Indigenous Australians for all the wrongs done to them in the past, “and our failure to imagine these things being done to us”. Paul’s language could certainly be cruel, though just about always leavened with a style and wit rather beyond Bob’s range: I remember fondly some of his less well-known sallies, in particular his description in the Cabinet Room on one occasion of a particular opponent as having “all the charm of a used suppository”. Keating was generally a much more multi-faceted character than Hawke: I once described him to an American audience, in terms I hoped they might understand, as a combination of Franklin Roosevelt, Mike Tyson, Leonard Bernstein and Lenny Bruce – statesman, bruiser, aesthete and foul-mouthed comedian. They don’t make them like that any more.
Kevin Rudd was, again, a complex mix. He remains probably the smartest person I have ever come across in public life (not a judgment with which I think he would be inclined to quarrel), with a huge capacity for policy analysis and advocacy. Those talents were abundantly on display internationally, for example, in the central role he played in working with Obama and others to craft a way through the Global Financial Crisis. The trouble was that he combined that with a famously dysfunctional approach to government management, too often showing a lack of empathy with the needs of his senior colleagues and public servants. But I do believe Kevin has always had a genuine store of decent values, for all that he sometimes kept them well-hidden– again most vividly on display with his Stolen Generations apology which, as even Tony Abbott as Liberal leader acknowledged, “movingly evoked… the stain on our soul”.
Malcolm Turnbull was another of our leaders with a Trump-like conviction that he was always the smartest person in room, and he was usually right (though he always claims, quite indefensibly, that I contested that whenever we met…). But Malcolm accompanied his self-confidence with an unquestionable constellation of genuinely decent personal values, most obviously on gender and climate-related issues. His tragedy in office was that he too often suppressed those values for the sake of perceived internal political advantage, ending up losing support all round.
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As with individuals, so too with nations. I have always strongly believed that in the conduct of international relations one should never begin to underestimate the significance of what most of the world, if not Donald Trump, understands to be a country’s soft power: not just being respected or feared for its military and economic might (its hard power), but being and being seen to be the kind of country that others admire, trust, want to visit, study in, invest in, and support in a crisis – in short, a decent country.
So it is that I have been arguing since I first became Foreign Minister in 1988 that it is important for Australia to be, and be seen to be, what I like to call – as I’ve foreshadowed – a good international citizen . This means being the kind of country which is, and is seen to be, not just wholly inward-looking and self-interested, but genuinely cares about poverty, conflict, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation and other problems afflicting people very often in places far from our own shores, and very often having little or no direct or immediate impact on one’s own security and prosperity.
Of course, the response one often gets from political hard-heads, as I can testify from my own Cabinet experience, is that all this is really just boy-scout stuff – something nice to do from time to time if there’s not much cost involved, and maybe if there is some domestic pressure group to be accommodated – but not the real business of national government. My answer always has been that we have both a moral imperative and a national interest imperative to be, and be seen to be, a good international citizen.
The starting point, but not the finishing point, in making the case for good international citizenship is simply that this is the right thing to do—that states, like individuals, have a moral obligation to do the least harm, and the most good, they can. Answers will vary, depending on one’s philosophical or spiritual bent, as to what is the source of that obligation. But the striking thing is just how much convergence there is around basic principles, whether one’s approach to ethics is religiously or humanistically based, and whatever the cultural tradition in which one has been brought up.
We should think of advocates for different approaches to moral reasoning – whether Christian or Utilitarian or Kantian or Rawlsian or anything else – as a British philosopher has put it, as “climbing the same mountain from different sides”. In their different ways the different ethical traditions, both religious and secular, all point in essentially the same direction: demanding at their core respect for our common humanity. And recognition of, and respect for, our common humanity is the moral core of the concept of good international citizenship.
The other dimension of my case for good international citizenship, and one that political hard-heads tend to find more compelling, is based not on morality but the national interest: the returns are more than just warm inner glows. Everyone gets it that the traditional core business of any country’s foreign policy is how we protect and advance our national interests in two big ways: ensuring our physical security and our material prosperity. My strong belief is that there is a third dimension to any country’s national interests – being and seen to be a good international citizen — which should also be regarded as our core business, just as much as those two traditional dimensions, and not just an optional extra.
Decent behaviour can generate hard-headed, practical national advantage of the kind that appeals to realists—and political cynics—as well as idealists, and do so in three ways. The first return is reputational. A country’s general image, how it projects itself—its culture, its values, its policies—and how in turn it is seen by others, is of fundamental importance in determining how well it succeeds in advancing and protecting its traditional national interests. Over many decades of active international engagement I have witnessed, over and again, how this “soft power” – as I’ve already described it – matters. There can be no clearer case study of the impact of reputational collapse than that now being experienced by the US with Donald Trump’s retreat from decency: tourism, overseas investment and the primacy of the dollar are already under acute strain.
The second return from good international citizenship is reciprocity. Foreign policymakers are no more immune to ordinary human instincts than anyone else, and if I take your problems seriously, you are that much more likely to help me solve mine. The reciprocity involved is not always explicit or transparent, and subtlety will often be an advantage in achieving it. But no practising diplomat will be unaware of the reality, and utility, of this dynamic, and no government policymaker should be oblivious to it.
The third return is simply getting more stuff done – making progress on issues where the whole world does ultimately benefit, like climate change, but where the national costs for many players might seem for a long time to outweigh the benefits, and where the necessary collective international action is accordingly very hard to achieve. The more states that have a cooperative, collective, good-international citizenship mindset, the better the chance of these things getting done. This is a classic area for the kind of middle power cooperation that has long been a recurring theme in Australian foreign policy (at least under Labor governments), but has now been given overdue new momentum by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s seminal advocacy in Davos in January this year.
My argument that good international citizenship is both a moral imperative and a national interest imperative – that it is possible to be simultaneously both idealistic and pragmatic – might be thought by some political leaders to be too complicated a story for them to tell. My answer is to remind them of the famous admonition of Scottish Labour MP Jimmy Maxton, in the 1930s: “If tha’ can’t ride two horses at once, tha’ve no right to be in bloody circus.”
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Australia likes to think of itself as a good international citizen and from time to time has deserved to be so regarded. But only from time to time. Explicit commitment to the concept of good international citizenship as a core element of our foreign policy has waxed and waned over the last four decades. And against the benchmarks which I think are most relevant, our overall record in practice has been patchy at best, lamentable at worst, and presently not what it could and should be.
On overseas aid, we have been the worst-performed of any rich-country donor in terms of the decline in our generosity over the last five decades, with a current ODA commitment of just 0.18 per cent of GNI, against the OECD target level of 0.7 per cent. Of course we have budgetary stress, but one can’t help but be wistful about the difference that would be made by the diversion to this quintessential soft power enterprise of just a tiny proportion of the eyewatering hundreds of billions being devoted to the wholly misconceived AUKUS submarine project.
In meeting our responsibilities to refugees and asylum seekers, our record has been at times in the past a very proud one, but in recent years, on both sides of politics since Tampa, little short of shameful. On human rights generally, where what happens at home very much matters abroad – nobody likes a hypocrite – our record remains at best mixed, and is seen as such internationally.
In peacemaking diplomacy, and responding to mass-atrocity crimes, opportunities to play the kind of creative diplomatic role we were able to in ending the Cambodian conflict do not often arise, but we can certainly do better than we have done in recent years in commitment to UN blue-helmet and other peacekeeping operations, where our boots-on-the-ground contributions have fallen to the lowest level for decades.
Our international performance has also been at best mixed in helping meet what have been regarded until now as the three great existential risks to life on this planet as we know it: pandemics, climate change and nuclear war. With the fourth such risk now rapidly emerging – AI – we seem determined, under the present Albanese Government, to play a constructive part, but time will tell as to what effect. With respect to pandemic response, including support for struggling countries in our own region, we can maybe claim a narrow pass. In the case of climate change, barely that. Chris Bowen’s leadership brief for the next COP gives Australia the chance of redeeming our well-earned international reputation as a grudging, minimalist, climate laggard. But managing effective transition to a genuinely low-carbon economy still faces huge obstacles in the absence of across-the-board political and industry buy-in.
On nuclear weapons, arguably the most immediate global risk of all in the present environment, Australia has played a useful role in the past, in multiple international forums, in advancing both risk reduction and the ultimate goal of elimination. We can again, but in recent years our contribution has, while energetic, been risk averse. My highest priority here would be to support the struggling but still growing international movement for the universal adoption of No First Use doctrine by all the nuclear-armed states. It should not be a matter of pride for us that when both President Obama and President Biden were attracted to going down this path (or at least to its “sole purpose” functional equivalent), Australia was one of those nervous Asia-Pacific and East European allies who failed to support them. And our current government is still showing no appetite at all for pursuing this brief.
As to the extent to which successive Australian Governments have been committed to the concept, and used the language, of good international citizenship, the story is again mixed. It was certainly a central guiding pillar of foreign policy during the last eight years of the Hawke-Keating Government, when I was Foreign Minister. But it was then explicitly rejected by my successor Alexander Downer and the Howard Government, in favour of a vague commitment to “national values” as being important in our policymaking, only to be then explicitly resurrected by the Rudd and Gillard Governments of 2007-13. The language was occasionally used by Tony Abbott – he liked three-word mantras – but never actually applied; and it dropped out of sight – neither embraced nor disavowed, just ignored – under Turnbull and Morrison.
The Albanese Government has so far resisted my blandishments to restore the concept of good international citizenship to centrality in our foreign policy. Neither our Prime Minister nor Foreign Minister are given to making big, visionary conceptual statements, but they could do better than they have done so far in this space. Penny Wong says she doesn’t disagree with the concept of good international citizenship, as specifically embraced by the Hawke-Keating and Rudd-Gillard Labor governments in the past, but prefers to use the language of “constructive internationalism”. But I’m not sure that that kind of language gets the job done; it implies little more than a commitment to multilateral institutional process, without any real hint as to the ends to which that process should be directed.
Anthony Albanese’s own preferred shtick of “progressive patriotism”, while no doubt undeserving of Samuel Johnson’s famous riposte to a more cynical earlier user of the second p-word – that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” – clearly conveys no sense of commitment to any particular international causes or values.
In conceptualising and articulating their approach to Australian foreign policy there could hardly be a better opportunity for both our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister than the UN General Assembly and other forums they are addressing this week. My pitch to them both is to play to their perceived, and real, personal strengths as thoroughly decent human beings, leading a government which is itself basically decency-driven. Albanese has often spoken of “kindness” as the quintessential virtue, and “looking after each other” as the “Australian way”. It is not a big step from there to say – and the Atlantic Council ceremony at which he is to receive a “Global Citizen” award, would be the perfect occasion to do so – that we hugely value being perceived internationally as a decent country, that we rank as a core national interest in its own right, ranking alongside physical security and material prosperity, being and being seen to be a good international citizen, and that the world would be a better place if every country were to conceptualise its national interests in these terms.
A country with Australia’s general record and reputation as an energetic, creative middle power which has many times in the past played a world-leading role in international diplomacy, should be setting its sights higher. The bottom line is that we have just one planet, we are a global community, and our political leaders should give more weight than too many of them have been willing to do to what the great Australian international relations scholar Hedley Bull described as “purposes beyond ourselves”, and Abraham Lincoln famously called “the better angels of our nature”.
If the Albanese Government is to be in the business, as a great many observers certainly think it should be, of articulating a clearer vision of Australia’s future – what kind of country we should aspire to be in the decades ahead – then we could do a lot worse than making a very explicit part of that vision just this: a desire for Australia to be, and be seen to be in our own region and the wider world, as a good international citizen – as a decent country.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I?