A Tribute to Richard Woolcott

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Richard Woolcott (L), former Australian secretary of foreign affairs and trade, shares a light moment with Robert Zoellick (R), president of the World Bank, during the APEC 20th anniversary high-level symposium on November 10, 2009 in Singapore. (Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images)

By Robert Zoellick

The following remarks were made by Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, on presenting the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue honour to Asia Society's Founding Director of the AustralAsia Center, Richard Woolcott, in Washington on July 14, 2010. 

We all owe a special thanks to Phil Scanlan, who has brought extraordinary skills to his creation and encouragement of these meetings.

Now, one of the things I observed about Phil in attending these events is that "Australian" comes first when it's in Australia, and "American" comes first when it is held here. It therefore gives me great personal pleasure in presenting the first award of the A A Leadership honor to Dick Woolcott.

Dick Woolcott is one of Australia's great diplomats and public figures. He's been an adviser to every Australian prime minister since Bob Menzies. But lest you think that all of Dick's service was in striped pants or in fancy drawing rooms, I'd ask you to recall that "Australia" and "diplomacy" are not two words that easily slip off the tongue!

Of course, that's not really fair. But I was certain that God had a sense of humor when it struck me that he had placed the direct, hard-hitting, no-nonsense Australians in the midst of the Asia-Pacific—not exactly the models of the "ASEAN way."

Indeed, my first ever experience with Dick Woolcott over 20 years ago was emblematic. I had just arrived at the State Department with Secretary James Baker in 1989. We had come from the US Treasury, where Baker had activated the G-7 finance ministers' process to build toward cooperation on macro-economic stability, exchange rates, and growth—a cooperative effort that was the precursor to what one sees in the G-20 today.

One of our ideas at Treasury in 1988 was to launch an Asia-Pacific Finance Ministers' Group. One has to credit Baker's prescience in that he saw that the G-7 was too Eurocentric. We could see the rising importance of the Asian economies, and the links to exchange rates, trade, and growth. We wanted to send a diplomatic signal to the region and the American people that America's economic interests were linked to Asia-Pacific security interests.