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Foreign Minister back at the UN, one year on

Foreign Minister back at the UN, one year on
Published 16 Sep 2014   Follow @AlexKOliver

Later today, the 69th session of the UN General Assembly commences. One of Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's first official duties last year was to address the opening of the 68th session of the General Assembly, nine days after being sworn in as minister.

Bishop had a tough start as minister. First came the Indonesian spying scandal, with angry reactions in Indonesia and pointed criticism from Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. A few days later came a dressing down from China after Bishop denounced Beijing's move to unilaterally establish an air defence identification zone in late November. Ms Bishop then had to deal with breaches of Indonesian territorial waters by stray Operation Sovereign Borders vessels. There has also been the painful process of the Peter Greste case.

Then of course, the MH17 catastrophe. Ms Bishop earned the respect of her international and national peers in brokering a Security Council response to MH17.

Our Foreign Minister has been busy.

Yet amid all this noisy foreign policy action, the Minister has been quietly going about her other business. The New Colombo plan is on track. Relations with Indonesia have stabilised, with agreement reached on a code of conduct in late August. Australia is back in China's good books.

And then there is the MIKTA initiative. [fold]

MIKTA, you ask? As I wrote at the end of last year, this is a fledgling grouping which had its modest beginnings on the sidelines of the September 2013 UN General Assembly session. The acronym represents the five nations – Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey and Australia – who are 'members' of this informal group. They seek to 'strengthen the links between their nations, exchange views, consult and promote coordination on issues of common interest.' Early indications are that these are likely to include global governance reform, G20 work and finding solutions to global challenges such as the post-2015 development agenda. They have met twice this year, and in April spent a full day together in Mexico at the first MIKTA dialogue, resulting in a co-authored opinion piece in Huffpo in which the foreign ministers emphasised their similarities: they are all democracies, members of the G20, with open and dynamic economies, strategically located and each playing strong roles in their regions.

The first indications of how these nations will work together surfaced in the early days of the MH17 response, when the ministers of the five nations issued a joint statement condemning the downing and urging the peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis.

In August, Mexico hosted the first MIKTA academic seminar (which I attended) to identify some of the ways in which this diverse group ('a bunch of misfits' was the expression Michael Wesley used in his remarks) might cooperate constructively. While none of these academics spoke for their governments, there was a bundle of ideas, from working collaboratively against protectionist measures to freeing up visa restrictions, creating exchanges of students and journalists, and according each other 'most favoured nation' status.

It's early days, but each of the MIKTA foreign ministers appears enthusiastic about the possibilities of the new grouping. None of the five are part of a natural regional or security bloc, so their thinking is presumably that the grouping can achieve more together than each can achieve alone – the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. And while the parts are significant, the whole is potentially formidable. MIKTA nations are the world's 12th, 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th largest economies. Combined at US$5.8 trillion in GDP, they amount to the third-largest economy in the world after the US and China. Taken together, their populations rank the group as the third-largest in the world after China and India. If they can harness their collective strengths, this could be a useful grouping.

At the opening of the 69th session of the General Assembly, Ms Bishop will again meet with her MIKTA counterparts to progress their agenda. Watch this space. 

Photo courtesy of the Minister for Foreign Affairs.



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