Speech - Australia-ASEAN Youth Summit

I’d like to start by recognising the traditional owners and custodians of the various lands on which we meet today. For me and for all of you here at Parliament House, we're actually meeting on the lands of the Ngunnawal people. So, I want to pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and I want to acknowledge their ongoing cultural and educational practices.

And I also want to acknowledge my parliamentary colleagues who you've already met: the Honourable Jason Clare, Minister for Education and Tim Watts, the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs. And I understand that you've also been joined here, if not still being joined here, by various members of the diplomatic corps. Can I also acknowledge Dr Sarah Richardson, the Executive Director of the Asia Education Foundation.

This reminds me so much of all the time that I spent at the United Nations. So, I hope you're all getting fairly comfortable in this kind of format because I'm pretty sure you've all got great futures ahead of you. Do any of you have an aspiration to ever work for, or with, the United Nations? Anyone thinking of doing that as a career after they finish school?

Student: I’m joining the Model UN delegation.

Wow, great. Anyone else want to work for the UN? Well, you've got the experience now. This is what you do when you go to the UN. You sit in this format, you have your little microphone in front of you, and when it's your turn you give your speech. And as Jess mentioned, prior to entering parliament, I was a professor, but I was also a special advisor to the United Nations. So I got to do a lot of what you're doing within the specific field of counterterrorism and international security.

So, let me welcome you all to Parliament House. It is absolutely amazing to see you all today and to be able to meet you. Huge shout out to my WA peeps who I've had the opportunity to meet. I'm Anne, I'm the Minister for Youth in the Albanese Government, and I use she/her pronouns. Well, what an incredibly fun opportunity you have here to simulate diplomatic conversations. I've no doubt that the previous virtual summits, as well as this hybrid event today, will help you to grow and learn about international relations. It's a really interesting field. And it's not just about learning about other cultures, but it's also about how you represent your country within the region as well.

Now, today we get to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Australia’s dialogue partnership with ASEAN. And Australia became ASEAN's first dialogue partner in 1974, well before any of you were born, I'm sure. Now back in 1974, the then Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, said this, Australia had a ‘genuine and continuing interest in Southeast Asia’ and there could be ‘no turning back from this commitment’. He said Australia was ‘a steadfast partner, a true participant in the destiny of Southeast Asia’. Those words were true then and they are just as true now.

Southeast Asia, it's our neighbourhood. I’ve written a lot of pieces about Australia's geopolitical positioning in Southeast Asia and what that means for us as a country going forward, but how it's also impacted on our history and our identity as a nation as well. Safe to say, we've actually grappled with that identity of being part of Southeast Asia, as a settler nation with kinship ties to nations that are very, very far away from us - the UK and then later the US. I think it's been a long journey for Australia to find our place in our geopolitical positioning in Southeast Asia, and it is a journey that continues to evolve.

So, I think there's a lot of work that we can do. As well as the high-level diplomatic and international relations, it really starts with people-to-people relations. And that's where you all come in and the vital work that you're doing. I know that's been fun because I can see on your faces that it's been fun, and from talking to you that it's been fun. But it is also a critical part of what Joseph Nye calls soft power. Now, if any of you are going to study international relations when you get to university, you're going to learn all about Joseph Nye. He's one of my heroes. And Joseph Nye talks about soft power and hard power. And hard power is things like military and defence-type relations that you can have between nations. But soft power – soft power is the people-to-people, the cultural exchange, the student exchange, the power of influence, the power of friendship.

And I was watching a show the other day, it was Inside the Mind of a Dog, I was watching it with my dogs. All they were doing was barking at the dogs on the television, but I was trying to watch it. And it talked about how, about – you know, you've heard about survival of the fittest, right? But this show talked about survival of the friendliest and how dogs evolved from wolves, and they evolved from wolves to be domesticated through friendliness. Have you seen this show, Inside the Mind of a Dog?

Student: Yeah, I watched the beginning of it, and I saw that as well.

It's so great, it's a really great show. Anyway, so it got me thinking, this thing about survival of the fittest versus survival of the friendliest. And that's, in a nutshell, kind of the difference between hard and soft power that Joseph Nye talks about. Hard power is all about survival of the fittest – you know, defence, strong type stuff. But soft power is about survival of the friendliest. And as someone who's always had an interest in diplomacy, but also a keen interest in international security – I taught international relations, and I taught international security at universities as a professor – I see survival of the friendliest and soft power as a much more powerful lever in international relations and in regional cooperation than hard power. That's kind of something that I take away whenever I meet people like yourselves who are also demonstrating an interest in international relations, foreign affairs, and in the kind of the people-to-people connections that you can make and how important and influential people-to-people connections can be.

But let me move on to talk to you about what we're doing here as a Government within the youth portfolio, because it's a relatively new portfolio. And actually, you know what? We didn't even have an Office for Youth at the federal government level for the last ten years. So, one of the first things that we did when we came into Government was establish the Office for Youth. And my job as the Minister for Youth is not to speak on behalf of young people, but to help raise the voices of young people and to help ensure that youth advocacy and youth voices are included right across all the portfolio areas that we have here on issues that matter to young people, whether it's housing, homelessness, whether it's mental health, whether it's social media, or even whether it's international and foreign relations.

We developed a strategy to include young people in the decisions that we make that affect them. That strategy is called Engage! and within that, there's an engagement model that has a 15-person Youth Steering Committee and a number of Youth Advisory Groups in specific areas that work directly with ministers and directly with departments on particular programs and policies.

The whole point of this is to ensure that when we engage young people, we also give them a pathway to demonstrate that we have not just listened to them, but we've incorporated their feedback in the way that we do things. Ensuring that their engagement, and the work that they do, with government is substantive and has a tangible output to it as well. We want to make sure that all young people from all backgrounds, no matter where you live, no matter who you are, can have a say on government decisions.

So, if you want to find out more about our youth engagement strategy, and if you want to apply for our Youth Steering Committee or our Youth Advisory Groups - when the applications are open - head on to the website and keep an eye out. Because I would love to see more of you engaging in the work that the Government does - beyond what you're doing here today and through this forum, having an opportunity to engage with us on different areas as well.

So, I hope you all enjoy the opportunity you have to be here today. And I'm really, really honoured to be able to meet you all and to speak with you all, and to meet such wonderful and engaged global citizens and to see that our young people are interested in knowing what it means to be a global citizen as well. I encourage you to share all your knowledge and all your newfound skills. I can't wait to see how you use those skills and how you use all of that new knowledge to create a better future, not just for yourselves, but for all young people in the region. And how it changes our country as we move forward and we develop more of an identity as part of Southeast Asia, as part of our region. Your generation is the generation that will carry that forward and develop that identity. So, thanks for having me here today, and I really look forward to receiving your Youth Declaration.