Foreign Minister Penny Wong has delivered a landmark speech in the UK, telling Britain it must confront its colonial past as it looks to modernise its relationship with the Indo-Pacific region.
Speaking to an audience at King’s College in London, Wong shared details of her own family’s experience of British colonialism and said understanding the past can enable use to better share the present and future.
Wong explained that while her mother’s great-great-grandparents were some of the first British people to settle in South Australia, her father’s family had a very different experience of British colonialism.
“My father is descended from Hakka and Cantonese Chinese. Many from these clans laboured for the British North Borneo company in tin mines and plantations for tobacco and timber,” she said. “Many worked as domestic servants for British colonists, as did my own grandmother.”
“Such stories can sometimes feel uncomfortable – for those whose stories they are, and for those who hear them.”
Wong said understanding stories like this can create the opportunity to “find more common ground than if we stayed sheltered in narrower versions of our countries’ histories”.
Wong said the Indo-Pacific has become the region in which “the reshaping of our world is centred” and Australia now sees itself as being “in the Indo-Pacific, and being of the Indo-Pacific”. Fundamentally, this has changed the relationship between Britain and Australia, she said.
She said in the first 6 months of her time as Australia’s Foreign Minister, she has visited 24 Indo-Pacific countries as Australia looks to engage closely with the region.
“This work has rendered crystal clear that one of the most important ways our countries can modernise our relationships is in the story we tell the world about who we are, which is, of course, the starting point of our foreign policies,” she said.
“At the same time as we continue to invest in our longest-standing relationships, Australia is engaging ever more closely with the region – and making the case for greater global focus on our region.”
She said Australia has not always listened to the countries in the Indo-Pacific, but the current government is working to change that approach.