The meeting of 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) leaders in Sydney this week is sure to consolidate the importance of the region, but there are suggestions that APEC has outgrown its brief and is in dire need of reform.
Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, widely recognised for moving APEC from a regional forum to a leaders' meeting, said APEC needed to expand beyond trade liberalisation and embrace security issues.
Mr Keating said he had been concerned about long-term underlying tensions between China and Japan and the potential those tensions had to destabilise the region that had inspired the move to include an APEC leaders' summit.
"Those aims and that motivation are as relevant today, 15 years on, as they were then," he told a forum in Sydney last week.
Dr Ron Huisken, specialist in Asia-Pacific security at the Australian National University, said APEC is an excellent forum of engagement in the region, but needed to be redefined if it was going to be an effective vehicle for addressing developments.
"The 21st century is represented there [APEC]," he told The Epoch Times, but "for 10 to 12 years, 20 or so leaders have got together over a very boring, narrow agenda.
"I always felt it was under-utilised."
Australian Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said the Greens were disappointed that more progress had not been made in improving conditions for workers in the region and it was now time to broaden the scope of the APEC leaders' meetings.
"We think with Asia-Pacific leaders coming together, they should be talking about fair trade," Senator Nettle said, "and we would like to see more leaders talking about any trade agreements in terms of workers rights, human rights and the environment."
Formed in Canberra in 1989 as an informal 12-member Ministerial-level dialogue, APEC now includes some of the world's largest democracies (United States, Japan and Korea) and authoritarian states (China, Russia, Vietnam and Singapore).
According to The Australian Financial Review, APEC countries constitute more than 40 per cent of the world's population and 48 per cent of world trade. APEC countries also consume 60 per cent of the world's energy.
Dr Huisken said there were a range of issues that needed to be addressed by the region's leaders, including energy and security, but reforming APEC would not be an easy process.
Prime Minister John Howard was attempting to do that by putting climate change on the agenda, he said, but APEC members had not embraced that move.
"Howard sussed out attitudes amongst APEC members and they had signalled they were not ready to move beyond the original mandate of trade liberalisation," he said.
Paul Keating said the structure of APEC was "of inestimable strategic value", but the sheer numbers involved in the group were rendering it unwieldy.
"When countries like Papua New Guinea, Chile and Peru were invited to join APEC, it was expanded such as to make it less efficient, with the interests of the principal players in East Asia being diluted in the interests of a greater whole."
Dr Huisken suggested one way of ensuring the region was better represented was to leave APEC as a "trade and investment vehicle" and develop a smaller East Asian leaders forum.
Meanwhile, despite the dryness of many of the meetings and the seemingly difficult task of obtaining any tangible outcomes, Dr Huisken said the Sydney APEC meetings were valuable in providing a venue for informal discussions among leaders.
When leaders visit each other it is normally surrounded by "fanfare" and a lot of public exposure, he explained. In Sydney, leaders would have the opportunity to "develop a rapport" and address issues in a more open and informal way.
Dr Huisken said it was likely that Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would meet privately with Mr Howard and that Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President George Bush would hold informal discussions.
It was also likely that Mr Bush would want to meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao to discuss a range of concerns – most particularly China's military build-up, which was "disproportionate to any conceivable threat".
Dr Huisken said the behind the scenes meetings provided opportunities for more sensitive issues to be addressed. "It's hard to quantify, but kind of valuable."
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