[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 20 (Monday, February 6, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S748-S750]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  SENATE RESOLUTION 50--REAFFIRMING A STRONG COMMITMENT TO THE UNITED 
                 STATES-AUSTRALIA ALLIANCE RELATIONSHIP

  Mr. CARDIN (for himself, Mr. Alexander, Mr. Markey, Mr. Rubio, Mr. 
Durbin, Mrs. Shaheen, Mr. Coons, Mr. Schatz, Mr. Booker, and Mr. Blunt) 
submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee 
on Foreign Relations:

                               S. Res. 50

       Whereas Australia is a fellow democracy and vital partner 
     of the United States;
       Whereas the United States and Australia share core values 
     as well as deep cultural, security, and people-to-people 
     ties;
       Whereas Australia has been a treaty ally of the United 
     States since the signing of the Australia-New Zealand-United 
     States (ANZUS) Treaty in 1951;
       Whereas an alliance bond is a sacred vow of friendship and 
     trust, and Australia has always been a faithful and reliable 
     partner to the United States;
       Whereas United States-Australia defense and intelligence 
     ties and cooperation are exceptionally close, and Australian 
     forces have fought together with the United States military 
     in every significant conflict since World War I and over 
     100,000 Australian service members have paid the highest 
     price in the course of their service alongside United States 
     allies;
       Whereas Australia was one of the first countries to commit 
     troops to United States military operations in Afghanistan 
     and Iraq after September 11, 2001;
       Whereas Australia is a close partner of the United States, 
     sharing information essential to the defense and security of 
     the two countries, including through the Five Eyes 
     intelligence community;
       Whereas the United States-Australia alliance is an anchor 
     for peace and stability in the Indo-Asia Pacific region and 
     around the world;
       Whereas, United States and Australia signed the U.S.-
     Australia Force Posture Agreement at the annual Australia-
     United States Ministerial consultations (AUSMIN) in August 
     2014, paving the way for even closer defense and security 
     cooperation;
       Whereas, on October 2015, United States and Australia 
     defense agencies signed a Joint Statement on Defense 
     Cooperation to serve as a guide for future cooperation;
       Whereas Australia has welcomed proposals to reposition 
     United States Marines to maintain Marine forces in the 
     western Pacific and improve the United States strategic 
     posture in the Indo-Asia Pacific region;
       Whereas Australia has led peacekeeping efforts in the Indo-
     Asia Pacific, including in Timor-Leste and the Solomon 
     Islands;
       Whereas Australia and the United States share strategic 
     interests in the Indo-Asia Pacific region and globally, and 
     have worked together to promote these shared goals and 
     objectives;
       Whereas the United States and Australia have been free 
     trade agreement partners since 2005, and the United States 
     has a positive trade balance with Australia;
       Whereas robust United States-Australia defense cooperation 
     contributes not only to the mutual defense of the two 
     countries but also to American jobs;
       Whereas more than 300,000 United States jobs are supported 
     by United States exports to Australia and nearly 9,000 
     Australian companies sell or operate in the United States;
       Whereas the United States and Australia work closely in the 
     numerous global and regional fora, including the World Trade 
     Organization and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum;
       Whereas Australia shares many of the United States' 
     concerns in the struggle against Islamist militancy in 
     Southeast Asia and beyond, and is part of the global 
     coalition to defeat the ``so-called Islamic State (IS)''; and
       Whereas the United States and Australia have enjoyed a 
     close relationship over many successive Republican and 
     Democratic administrations: Now, therefore, be it
       Resolved, That the Senate--
       (1) reaffirms the strong alliance relationship between 
     Australia and the United States;
       (2) supports continued diplomatic, military, and economic 
     cooperation between Australia and the United States; and
       (3) reaffirms the importance of a United States-Australia 
     relationship based on mutual respect and befitting a close 
     and longstanding United States alliance partner crucial to 
     the preservation of United States national interests in the 
     Indo-Asia Pacific region and around the world.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, tonight the Senator from Maryland, Mr. 
Cardin, and I and a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, have submitted a 
resolution reaffirming the strong alliance between the United States 
and Australia. I wish to speak about that for a few minutes.
  I don't know what happened during last week's telephone call between 
the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Australia, 
but I do know this: The people of the United States do not have better 
friends than the people of Australia.
  We are more than friends. As one Australian told me when our family 
lived there thirty years ago, ``Well, we're mates all right. The 
English may be our ancestors but you Americans are our cousins. First 
cousins. We started out the same kind of people. Underprivileged, a 
long way from home, doing the same kind of thing, looking for a new 
life. Found a hard life. Hoped it would be a better one for our 
children. Each wave of new ones lifted up the last ones. A pioneering 
spirit in the countryside here. In America, too.''
  Even though they live down under on the other side of the world, for 
a century Australians have stood with us every time we are at war, and 
we have stood with them. During World War II, when Australian troops 
were fighting in North Africa and Europe, and the Japanese were bombing 
Darwin four times a day, the United States came to the rescue. In 1992, 
Dick Cheney and I, as members of President George H.W. Bush's Cabinet, 
traveled to Australia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Battle 
of the Coral Sea, when the U.S. Navy stopped Japan's advance. Today, no 
two countries trust one another and cooperate in security arrangements 
more than Australia and America. We trade, we visit one another, and 
our

[[Page S749]]

students study in each other's universities.
  Thirty years ago, our family lived an American dream and we moved to 
Australia. We arrived on Australia Day, January 26, 1987, 199 years 
after the first fleet of English settlers sailed into Sydney Harbor. 
After 8 years of swiveling in the Governor's chair, on the very day I 
was sworn out of office, my wife Honey and I and our four children flew 
to Sydney for Six Months Off in the ``Land Down Under.'' It was my 
wife's idea: an opportunity for a retreat from the merry-go-round of 
power and to discover what really was important.
  We rented a home in view of the most beautiful harbor in the world, 
bought an Australian car, and I learned to drive on the wrong side of 
the road. Our four children walked to Australian schools, and we all 
sank deeply into the culture of America's favorite cousins. I attended 
Chester A. Arthur Society meetings, where Australian Parliament members 
competed to show that they know more about American history than United 
States Senators do. We spent the night in the South Wales bush. We saw 
9-foot crocodiles in the Northwest Territory. We traveled by train to 
see the Melbourne Zoo and took a horseback trip across the Snowy 
Mountains. It didn't take long for us to understand what Mark Twain 
meant when he wrote: ``When a stranger from America steps ashore in 
Sydney . . . the thing that strikes him is that it is an English City 
with American trimmings.''
  We made friends then that exist to this day. Last year, four of those 
friends, the Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr and the Australian 
Ambassador to the United States Kim Beazley and their wives, spent the 
weekend with us at our home outside the Great Smoky Mountains in 
Tennessee. We cherish those friendships and our country's relationship 
with Australia. It is always appropriate for the U.S. Senate to 
reaffirm the importance of that relationship, and I am glad to join 
Senator Cardin and a long list of bipartisan U.S. Senators to do that 
again today.
  To offer a more complete understanding of what makes the Australians 
our favorite cousins, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the 
Record chapter 30 from my book ``Six Months Off,'' written after our 
time in Australia.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                       Chapter 30--First Cousins

       ``When a stranger from America steps ashore in Sydney . . . 
     the thing that strikes him is that it is an English city with 
     American trimmings.''--Mark Twain, Following the Equator
       You would have thought the Sydney taxi driver, who was 
     English, was speaking of his barely grown-up stepchildren.
       ``They hate the English, the Australians. Why? Because they 
     realize we're superior. Minute they find out you're from 
     England they've got a chip on their shoulder. It's the 
     convict thing--you know they came from convicts. It's the 
     darndest thing I've ever gotten myself into. I've been here 
     four years and now I've got a superiority complex.''
       The taxi paused at the entrance to the harbor bridge, but 
     no one was waiting to take the toll. I had read in the 
     morning Herald how toll-takers were striking in support of 
     the postal workers, who had stopped carrying mail while they 
     bargained for a pay increase. We sped on across without 
     paying and the genealogy lesson continued. ``Master the 
     little quirks of living here and you know it's not a bad 
     place, but the Aussies still need convincing of the fact. 
     They'll find their own identity one day. Then they won't have 
     to come on so strong. Over the years England ruled a bit too 
     heavily here, but the Aussies are their own people now. They 
     don't have to always prove themselves to anybody, but they 
     do.''
       The Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton Wentworth Hotel was 
     crowded with guests, black-tied and long-gowned for the 
     Australian-American Bicentennial Dinner. Honey and I found 
     our places and introduced ourselves and found that the other 
     ten who were dining with us at large round table number 27 
     were all Australian. We sat down and then were immediately 
     invited to rise so that the American ambassador could toast 
     the queen of Australia. The governor-general of Australia 
     responded with a toast to the president of the United States, 
     and we sat again.
       ``He is the only man in Australia for whom everyone will 
     always stand,'' explained the lady on my right, as the 
     governor-general began speaking so gently that the raucous 
     table talk in the ballroom quieted.
       ``It is a happy accident of fate that the Constitution of 
     the United States was being signed in 1787 just as our first 
     fleet was sailing eastward across the Atlantic from Rio to 
     Cape Town on the third leg of its ten-months long voyage. The 
     fleet carried a cargo of convicts who would have been on 
     their way to Georgia had not the American Revolution 
     succeeded and denied the British the opportunity to send 
     their prisoners to America.''
       The lady on my right, who wore a white dress and dangling 
     gold earrings, whispered, ``It's the 'in' thing now, you 
     know, to trace back to see if your ancestors were on the 
     first fleet. A lot of people have always known they were 
     descended from lawbreakers, but very few had been willing to 
     spend money to prove it.''
       The governor-general was proceeding toward a triumphant 
     conclusion. ``The links between our two nations have evolved 
     from earliest times. Out pioneers, like yours, were as 
     unlikely a band as one could conceive. Your gold rush spilled 
     into ours. Our constitution has been built on yours. Our 
     soldiers have died together and we have shared freedoms of 
     speech and of associations and of laws and of humanities and 
     of civil liberties--and now both of us are a melting pot. We 
     read your prose, we speak your poetry and watch your plays 
     and films. We even watch your terrible TV dramas!''
       Applause and generous expressions of affection erupted all 
     around, and the governor-general smiled, cautiously 
     retreated, and sat, and Dame Leonie Kramer of the University 
     of Sydney rose and strode to the microphone and spoke 
     bluntly.
       ``We are profoundly interested in one another, but we are 
     more profoundly ignorant. Americans, for example, are 
     enchanted that this is the land of the crocodiles but they 
     don't seem to have enough sense to stay out of the water when 
     they are here.''
       Dame Leonie Kramer then sat, and our table plunged into 
     grilled fresh fish and boiled asparagus tips and hot 
     conversation.
       The car dealer on my left said, ``When I was in America, 
     they thought we had roos hopping in the streets and crocs in 
     the swimming pools and abos behind the fences.'' His short-
     cropped hair and narrow tie and innocent eagerness would have 
     made him a perfect candidate for the role of father in a 
     1950s American family television series.
       His plumpish wife agreed. ``Most Americans can't find 
     Australia on the map, and even when they do you always have 
     to prove to them that it's as bi as the United States.''
       Her husband laughed. ``One bloke coming to the America's 
     Cup almost went back when he found out Perth is as far from 
     Sydney as L.A. is from New York.''
       A tanned young blond woman, sitting between the car dealer 
     and me, said, ``I was skiing in Denver once, was on the lift, 
     and an American man was in the next seat and he was trying to 
     come on to me, and so he asks me, `In Australia it's summer, 
     isn't it?,' and I say `Right.' And then in a minute he says, 
     `And what month is it in Australia?'''
       The Australians especially enjoyed that, which encouraged 
     the blonde, who turned to me and asked, ``How do you like 
     Australia?'' She asked this in the same worried way 
     Californians used to question visiting New Yorkers.
       I said, ``It's beautiful and friendly, but what surprises 
     me is how much like America it is. Sometimes I think I'm at a 
     family on another planet.''
       The blonde said, ``It is another planet, orbiting in sight 
     of the big ones but never to be one.''
       The plumpish wife of the car dealer agreed. ``We always 
     seem to be missing something.''
       I said, ``But, for an American, coming to Australia is 
     almost better than going home again. When you try to go home 
     again it's a disappointment. It's only nearly perfect. But 
     when you come to Australia it's such a pleasant surprise how 
     nearly perfect it is.''
       The car dealer said, ``I reckon everyone in America must 
     have heard about your family reunion. Three hundred thousand 
     of 'em coming this year. That's what the telly said.''
       The lady in the white dress and earrings on my right asked, 
     ``Isn't Australia just the flavor-of-the-month in America? 
     Couldn't we just as well be Timbuktu?''
       ``It's more than that,'' her thin and red-faced husband 
     said. He was a member of Parliament.
       Honey, who was sitting on the right of the member of 
     Parliament, suggested, ``Some Americans come here looking for 
     `The America that Was.' ''
       The M.P. said, ``Some of us hope America is the ``Australia 
     the Might Be.' ''
       The car dealer leaned across the table and said to them, 
     ``And you'll both be disappointed. Australia's the land of 
     bushmen and sheepshearers and croc hunters in about the same 
     way America's the land of Hopalong Cassidy and the cowboys.''
       His plumpish wife supported him. ``Crocodile Dundee's a 
     fairy tale, isn't that right? And America's not really like 
     Miami Vice.'' She didn't seem entirely sure.
       I said, ``Sometimes we don't know so much about ourselves. 
     Sometimes we're visitors in our own countries.''
       Waiters arrived with plates of an Australian dessert called 
     a Pavlova--whipped cream and fresh papaya in meringue shell--
     and exclamations over its fluffiness only temporarily 
     diminished the conversation.
       ``Well, we're mates, all right.'' The car dealer could not 
     tolerate a lull. ``The English may be our ancestors, but you 
     Americans are our cousins''.
       ``First cousins,'' said the thin, red-faced member of 
     Parliament, whom I sensed correctly was preparing to make a 
     statement. ``We started out the same kind of people, 
     underprivileged, a long way from home, doing

[[Page S750]]

     the same sort of thing, looking for a new life. Found a hard 
     life. Hoped it would be better for the children. Each wave of 
     new ones lifted up the last ones. A pioneering spirit in the 
     countryside here. In America, too.''
       ``I love America!'' exclaimed the wife of the Australian 
     bicentennial chairman who was sitting across the table. Her 
     cheerful face had been hidden behind an enormous centerpiece 
     of flowers. ``When they sing `New York, New York' I get 
     excited with the best of 'em. It's our second home. It opens 
     your eyes a bit, doesn't it, to get out of your own 
     country.''
       ``When you do, we look awfully small.'' The speaker was a 
     dour bald gentleman sitting next to her, who might have been 
     seventy, a plywood manufacturer who was rather obstructed by 
     the centerpiece. For the moment, he held the floor. ``Our GNP 
     is about the size of the GNP of Los Angeles.''
       The blond woman said, ``Australia's a village, same names 
     always popping up.''
       The plywood man said, ``Americans have got a head start and 
     size and location and better education, and they have more 
     self-confidence.''
       This resonated with the blond woman's male guest, whose 
     name I never got in all the din and who now decided to talk 
     to me. ``We follow America. You regulate the stock market, so 
     we do it, too. You change school curriculum. We do it, too. 
     Don't think about it. Just do it.''
       ``We'd have been better off to start with pilgrims and a 
     revolution, instead of convicts,'' said the plywood 
     manufacturer.
       ``We could have used an Alamo,'' suggested the car dealer. 
     ``We had Gallipoli,'' said the blonde's friend.
       ``Wouldn't it have been nice to have something in the 
     center besides a red desert?'' sighed the plywood man's wife.
       The last of the fluffy Pavlova had been scraped from the 
     plates, and the coffee and mints arrived.
       The young blond woman suddenly turned to me and insisted, 
     ``I reckon I ought to have a quarter of a vote every time you 
     elect a president. I should. After all, we sit here half our 
     time waiting for American to do something. Our prime minister 
     can't make a deal with Gorbachev. No one's wondering what 
     Australia's trade policy will be. We have to depend on you.''
       ``We already do,'' said the member of Parliament. ``Do 
     what?'' asked the blonde.
       ``Depend on America. For defense. For things we really 
     enjoy. Ask any of our school kids. I've done it. `Where would 
     you like to go on this planet?' and nine out of ten say, 
     `Disneyland.' The script for every Australian Tonight show 
     was prepared by an American until recently.''
       The car dealer was saying to Honey, ``We never can have 
     anything like the things that you have in America. There're 
     not enough of us Aussies. Disneyland and interstate 
     highways--things that are ordinary to you--are a wonder to 
     us. Space stations. All the museums in Washington, D.C.''
       ``Another reason we can't is what's happening on Pitt 
     Street,'' intoned the plywood manufacturer.
       ``The esplanade work?''
       ``The lack of it. Did you hear the workers complained about 
     passersby harassing them for leaning on their shovels? And 
     that yesterday the arbitration board awarded them a twenty-
     seven-cent wage increase because of the harassment!''
       The blond woman's date said, ``Watch them on MacQuarie 
     Street, at the restoration, the workers smearing suntan oil. 
     It would make a good frame for `still life.' I watched them 
     from my club window yesterday at lunch.''
       The car dealer said, ``Sunday's Herald said United stewards 
     works twice as much as Qantas stewards.''
       I said, ``You see that on flights to Tokyo. The same Qantas 
     crews going up on Monday and coming back on Thursday. And 
     last month the Bridgestone Tire Company president told me his 
     tire plants work three hundred forty-five days in Japan and 
     America, and the Bridgestone plant in Adelaide works only two 
     hundred ten.''
       The plywood man looked positively funereal. ``We're 
     unusual, all right. We pay double time for afternoon work, 
     for overtime, for vacation. We pay for days off on a 
     butchers' picnic and a bakers' picnic--everybody has a picnic 
     and we pay for that. How are we going to compete with the 
     rest of the world when we're on a picnic?''
       Now the men were enjoying long cigars and the ladies were 
     doing their best to survive the haze, and my watch said the 
     dinner had already lasted three hours.
       Honey said. ``I see a lot of Japanese cars and American 
     fast foods, but I don't hear much proper English. Is it 
     because I'm American and just don't notice it?''
       ``It's because we've changed,'' said a lady across the 
     table who up till now had been mostly listening. ``We moved 
     here in 1978. We decided Sydney winters were better than 
     English summers, so we sold our house in London. Then, 
     Australians still spoke of `going home' to England. Now, no 
     one talks about `going home.' Australianness is coming out 
     all round. We're more American, too, but mainly we're prouder 
     of being Australian.''
       The wife of the member of Parliament said to Honey, ``Read 
     our children's books. I'll send you some for your children. 
     Instead of stories about English hobgoblins, there are more 
     about aborigine spirits and stories full of the sounds of 
     frogs croaking and of the didgeridoo, hostile and growling 
     like the bely of the earth.''
       Honey said, ``The new Sheraton in Yulara was lovely, brown 
     like the desert and built like sails.''
       The wife of the M.P. said, ``Our Australianness came out 
     all right when they tried to kill the brumbies in the Snowy 
     Mountains. Put a stop to that.''
       Honey said, ``We've seen a lot of Australia in David 
     Williamson's plays and Mary Gilmore's poetry and Ken Done's 
     bright splashy painting . . .''
       ``. . . and Fred Elliot's old marine watercolors even if he 
     was drunk a lot,'' I added.
       The wife of the plywood manufacturer said, ``And I believe 
     we're learning that our harsh vast spaces and distance from 
     everyone sometimes can be a wonderful advantage.'' Those were 
     the first words she had uttered in nearly two hours.
       From behind the centerpiece of flowers came the cheerful 
     contribution of the wife of the bicentennial chairman. 
     ``Eight hundred ten of our eight hundred thirty shires have 
     bicentennial committees.''
       The member of Parliament added, ``At least now we toast the 
     queen of Australia instead of the empire.'' His wife, on my 
     right with white dress and earrings, asked me, ``Have you 
     tried the wichety grubs, the moth larvae the abos used to 
     eat? They're all the rage. Large and crispy and in all the 
     best restaurants.''
       ``No,'' I said, ``but I have been to the beaches and I have 
     thought about those convicts who were laughing at the 
     aborigines standing there sandy and naked and greasy. Now, 
     the descendants of some of those first-fleet convicts are on 
     the same beaches, sandy and naked and greasy.''
       The member of Parliament had arranged himself into speaking 
     position. ``Remember. The English left us. We didn't leave 
     them. They joined the Common Market. Gave us five years to 
     adjust our exports.''
       This roused the car dealer, who said, ``It goes back to the 
     last war. Churchill said, `Let them have Australia. We'll win 
     it back.' Our boys were on the other side, fighting in North 
     Africa and in Europe and the Japanese were bombing Darwin 
     four times a day. The Americans saved us.''
       His wife, who was finishing off his mints, too, agreed. 
     ``Two Christmases ago there were ten thousand American 
     sailors in Perth and some family took every one of `em home 
     for the holidays.''
       The lights dimmed and the official bicentennial film began. 
     Trumpets heralded the arrival of the first fleet of 
     ``settlers'' on Australia's Identity Day, January 26, 1788, 
     and violins moved the story quickly along into the nineteenth 
     century, and then lingered amid the excitement of the gold 
     rush at Ballarat.
       I whispered to the wife of the member of Parliament, ``It 
     didn't mention that the `settlers' were convicts.''
       ``No worries,'' she said. ``The first bicentennial logo 
     forgot Tasmania. Had to make a new one. But it's a good 
     thing, our bicentennial. Helps us remember important 
     things.''

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