{"id":44654,"date":"2022-02-09T21:55:58","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T05:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=44654"},"modified":"2022-02-09T21:55:58","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T05:55:58","slug":"secretary-antony-j-blinken-opening-remarks-at-a-conversation-at-university-of-melbourne-with-students-and-u-s-government-and-exchange-alumni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=44654","title":{"rendered":"Secretary Antony J. Blinken Opening Remarks at a Conversation at University of Melbourne With Students and U.S. Government and Exchange Alumni\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
02\/09\/2022 08:56 PM EST<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State<\/p>\n

Melbourne, Australia<\/p>\n

University of Melbourne<\/p>\n

SECRETARY BLINKEN:<\/b>\u00a0 Well, good morning.\u00a0 So wonderful to be with you today, to start the day in Australia, to start the day here at the University of Melbourne.\u00a0 And I was particularly looking forward to this event, having an opportunity to have a conversation, to hear from you, to exchange some thoughts.\u00a0 And as the vice chancellor said, there are a lot of reasons why I\u2019m here in Australia, and we can get into those.\u00a0 But there are a couple of particular reasons why I\u2019m here at the university, on this campus at this time.\u00a0 One of them has to do with the fact that I really wanted to engage with some of the sharpest and youngest minds in the country and talk about the future that we have, I hope, together between our countries.<\/p>\n

But as the vice chancellor said, there\u2019s also something profoundly personal about this for me.\u00a0 As he noted, my late stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was an alumnus of this institution.\u00a0 And without going into too many details, let me say this, because I think it resonates profoundly over the years:\u00a0 He was born in Bialystok, Poland and born before the Second World War.\u00a0 Bialystok, Poland was a thriving center of Jewish life in Poland before the war.\u00a0 But he turned out to be the only member of his immediate family to survive.\u00a0 There were about 900 kids in the school in Bialystok; he\u2019s the only that survived from that school.\u00a0 His mother, his father, his sister perished in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

He himself, after enduring Soviet occupation of the ghetto, was shipped off to work camps and concentration camps \u2013 Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek, and others.\u00a0 After the war though, as it was ending and he was on a death march out of the camps, he made an escape for it and somehow managed to escape, to survive, to be rescued by American GIs, and to be brought back into the world.<\/p>\n

But the reason he was brought back into the world was ultimately because of Australia.\u00a0 He had an aunt who had left Poland before the war to go to Paris, two uncles \u2013 Lazar Sokolofsky who came to Australia \u2013 and they ultimately brought him in.\u00a0 And he had had, of course, no education for four years.\u00a0 He was 16 years old by the time he got to Australia.\u00a0 And as he put it, as he told us, as he told the family for years, Australia remade him.\u00a0 It remade him as a person, it remade him as someone who followed intellectual pursuits, it remade him into a human being.<\/p>\n

And this institution was fundamental to that.\u00a0 Sir Zelman Cowen, who was referenced, was his great mentor.\u00a0 After being here, after going to the law academy, Sir Zelman managed to help him get a scholarship to Harvard Law School in the United States.\u00a0 He wound up being an advisor to President Kennedy, had an extraordinary career as a writer and as a lawyer.<\/p>\n

But for him and thus for our family, Australia has a particularly special place.\u00a0 It showed, after a demonstration of how humanity is capable of the worst, it\u2019s also capable of the best \u2013 literally bringing someone back to life in every aspect of what that means.<\/p>\n

And I want to say too, he somehow escaped from the horrors of that time with his best friend, Ben Kaufman, and Ben too came to Australia.\u00a0 My stepfather insisted that his uncles bring Ben as well.\u00a0 And Ben stayed in Australia, built an extraordinary life here in Melbourne, a family.\u00a0 I think somewhere out here is his son Paul Kaufman.\u00a0 Paul, are you here?\u00a0 (Applause.)\u00a0 Ben, his wife Bebka, Paul, Molly, his sister \u2013 we\u2019ve all been mates for life, and so good to see you, my friend.<\/p>\n

And that brings me to today.\u00a0 Our countries too, our people too, in an incredibly challenging time I think are also mates for life.\u00a0 And there\u2019s a simple reason for that.\u00a0 Despite the vast distance between us geographically, the distance that I traveled yesterday, there\u2019s virtually no distance between us when it comes to our basic outlook, to our basic values, to our basic interests.\u00a0 And at a time when so many of those values and interests are being challenged, I think there\u2019s more of an imperative than ever that our two countries be together, work together, tackle these challenges together.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll just say this before we get into the conversation, which is from the perspective of the United States:\u00a0 As we\u2019re looking out at the things that truly have an effect on all of us, all of our citizens in different ways every day, whether it\u2019s the changing climate, whether it\u2019s this pandemic that we all continue to live through, whether it\u2019s the impact of emerging technologies that are literally shaping our lives, what we know in the United States, half a world away, is that we cannot effectively deal with these challenges alone.\u00a0 Whatever our power, whatever our resources, whatever our capabilities, we simply can\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

When it comes to climate, we\u2019re 15 percent of global emissions.\u00a0 Even if we did everything right at home, we still have to deal with the other 85 percent of emissions that are coming from other countries.\u00a0 So we have an imperative of finding ways to work together.<\/p>\n

COVID, as we\u2019ve all been living through \u2013 we know this \u2013 it may \u2013 it may become a clich\u00e9, but it is profoundly true.\u00a0 No one is safe until everyone is safe, and as long as the disease is percolating somewhere and a variant could pop up, you might get a variant that defeats everything you\u2019ve done.\u00a0 And so we have a profound incentive together in making sure that the world is vaccinated.<\/p>\n

And these technologies that we\u2019re all dealing with every day \u2013 the phones that I see on everyone\u2019s table, that are in my pocket \u2013 we know that the way they\u2019re used \u2013 the rules, the norms that shape the way they\u2019re used, are either going to help them be technologies that advance the good in humanity or do the opposite.\u00a0 And there again, we have a strong incentive in coming together to determine what those rules will be, what those norms will be, what those standards will be.<\/p>\n

And that all starts with likeminded countries, countries coming from the same basic value set, the same (inaudible), putting their resources together, putting their thinking together, putting their energies together to try to advance and make progress.\u00a0 And that\u2019s fundamentally what this relationship between the United States and Australia is all about.\u00a0 That\u2019s at least what I believe it\u2019s about.\u00a0 But I\u2019m anxious to hear from you what you think it\u2019s about \u2013 what we\u2019re doing right, what we\u2019re doing wrong, and how we should be thinking about it.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m really grateful to start this trip here, to start it with you, and I welcome the conversation.\u00a0 (Applause.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

02\/09\/2022 08:56 PM EST   Antony...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44655,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654\/revisions\/44655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}