Australian PM wants Asia-Pacific union

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday that he wants to see an Asia-Pacific Community by 2020 structured similar to the European Union.

Rudd said there was a "brittleness" in bilateral ties, and that while regional bodies like ASEAN and APEC had achieved much, there was a need for a region-wide architecture to tackle the growing challenges of the Asia-Pacific century.

"Terrorism in Southeast Asia will remain a continuing challenge. Across wider continental Asia, the rise of India and China represent great economic, environmental, energy policy and security reverberations for the future," Rudd said in a speech to the Asia Society Australiasia in Sydney.

"I believe it is time that we started to think about where we want to be with our regional architecture in 2020. We need to have a vision for an Asia-Pacific Community," he said, adding the world could learn from Europe where centuries of animosity had been transformed into transnational cooperation.

Rudd said an Asia-Pacific Community, which should include the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and the other states of the region, would encourage cooperation and action on economic, political and security issues but also develop a "genuine and comprehensive sense of community".

"The danger in not acting is that we run the risk of succumbing to the perception that future conflict within our region may somehow be inevitable," said Rudd.

"At present none of our existing regional mechanisms as currently configured are capable of achieving these purposes." More

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