June 05, 2008, the Australian:
KEVIN Rudd wants to spearhead the creation of an Asia-Pacific Union similar to the European Union by 2020 ...10 June 2008, Joel Butler
The Prime Minister said last night that the union, adding India to the 21-member APEC grouping, would encompass a regional free-trade agreement and provide a crucial venue for co-operation on issues such as terrorism and long-term energy and resource security ...
"We need to have a vision for an Asia-Pacific community, a vision that embraces a regional institution, which spans the entire Asia-Pacific region - including the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and the other states of the region," said the Prime Minister.
The body would be "able to engage in the full spectrum of dialogue, co-operation and action in economic and political matters and future challenges related to security".
"The purpose is to encourage the development of a genuine and comprehensive sense of community whose habitual operating principle is co-operation," Mr Rudd said.
"The danger of not acting is that we run the risk of succumbing to the perception that future conflict within our region may somehow be inevitable." ...
"I've always thought that this was the part of the world where Australia lives, and if an Asia-Pacific community does develop, it's essential that Australia be part of it." ...
But Mr Rudd said now was the appropriate time to re-examine the regional diplomatic and economic architecture because foreign policy based only on bilateral agreements had "a brittleness".
"To remove some of that brittleness, we need strong and effective regional structures," Mr Rudd said.
"Strong institutions will underpin an open, peaceful, stable, prosperous and sustainable region." ...
While the EU should not provide "an identikit model", the Asia-Pacific region could learn much from the union, which in the 1950s had been seen by sceptics as unrealistic.
"Our special challenge is that we face a region with greater diversity in political systems and economic structures, levels of development, religious beliefs, languages and cultures, than did our counterparts in Europe," Mr Rudd said. "But that should not stop us from thinking big." ...
"I fully recognise this will not be an easy process ... but the speed and the scope of changes in our region means we need to act now. Ours must be an open region - we need to link into the world, not shut ourselves off from it ...
Free trade means free movement:
Rudd is a dangerous man. A habitual operating principle of co-operation sounds like unguarded lunacy to me. Goodnight Australia.Kevin Rudd’s proposal to implement an European Union-like organisation in the Asia-Pacific region is nothing short of insane. The conditions prevailing in Europe in the 1950s when integration was first proposed, or even now that it has been more fully achieved, and those in the Asia Pacific region are so different that even the suggestion that a similar integrative structure might work is simply ludicrous.
One of the basic structural processes operative in the EU is the free movement of people within the EU’s member countries. In this day and age, free movement of people is a necessary underpinning for “free trade” since - especially for countries like Australia - the trade in services which are delivered by people are is more and more important than the trade in goods.
A European Union based model in the Asia Pacific region that allows free trade by allowing the free movement of people between member states would mean the end of Australia as we know it. It would be completely and utterly unworkable because it would see mass-migration of overseas workers into Australia at a level so completely unmanageable as to lead to the breakdown of the economy and the social infrastructure ...
Using the example of exactly what happened in the EU after the entry of Eastern European States illustrates this point ...
“About 600,000 people have come to work in the UK from eight nations which joined the European Union in 2004,” says Home Office minister Tony McNulty. “New figures show that 447,000 people from Poland and the seven other new EU states have applied to work in the UK.” But Mr McNulty said the figure would be nearer 600,000 if self-employed workers - such as builders - were included ...
In the year these migration statistics were announced, the UK had a income per capita of $40,180 whereas Poland had a income per capita of just $8,190 (or 20 per cent of the UK’s) ... Clearly, the UK was a more desirable place to live than Poland and so poor, unemployed workers had an incentive to move - and did.
Logically, the same thing would happen in Australia were Australia to be a member of a “no-borders” EU style grouping of countries, where some of those countries were poorer than Australia.
In 2006 Australia’s income per capita was $35,990: China’s income per capita was $2,010; Indonesia’s income per capita was $1,420; and India’s income per capita was $820.
One would have to assume that migration from any of these countries to Australia is significantly more appealing than from Poland to the UK. Income levels in the UK were about five times higher than in Poland in 2006: Australian income levels were about 18 times more than in China, 25 times more than in Indonesia and almost 44 times more than in India.
China’s population in 2006 was 1,311 million, Indonesia’s was 225 million and India’s was 1,121 million - a total of 2.657 billion people. Using the very crude equivalent measure of Poles moving to the UK after its accession to the EU with these figures, an EU-type organisation that included Australia and these three Asian countries (leaving aside all the other proposed members) would see a migration to Australia of about 21.256 million people. Australia’s population in 2006 was only 20.6 million ...
... the implementation of an “EU-like” model (unless it wasn’t like the EU model at all!) would simply not benefit this country.
Perhaps Mr Rudd didn’t mean he thought an EU-like model was a good one for the Asia Pacific region ... But if that was the case - where free movement of goods services and people is the backbone of the EU system - what did he mean?
... if Mr Rudd did mean what he said, it is clearly of concern to us all.
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