We live in troubling times, globally and regionally, with not the least of our troubles being the current occupant of the White House.

What most troubles me about Donald Trump — and I think should trouble all of us whatever our political leanings, and I’m conscious that not all of you here will share mine — is not just the dumb destructiveness of his assault on all that is best in the global economic and security order we have known since the end of World War II, an order from which just about everyone, not least the US itself, has benefitted.

It’s not just having as the current leader of the free world someone who seems not to believe in the free world nor want to lead it, treating as he does the world trade system as a freeloaders’ conspiracy against America; the UN and other international institutions as useless encumbrances on great power freedom of action; allies, too, as encumbrances rather than assets; and naked cross-border aggression as something to be tolerated if exercised within a great power’s sphere of influence. Beyond all that, what I find just as troubling, and in many ways even more distasteful, about the current US president is his total abandonment of any sense of decency, whether it be at the personal, national or international level. There’s the narcissistic vulgarity of his personal language and behaviour. There’s his approach to governing the US domestically, with his contempt for free speech, democratic process, the courts and the Constitution, immigrants, diversity and equity issues, and higher education. And, most immediately relevant to my main theme, there’s his approach to the conduct of international relations, where he seems unable to understand that the currency that matters most is not the crude and contemptuous exercise of raw national power, but respect and trust.

It is not unusual for political leaders to be narcissistic and self-absorbed, with a degree of self-belief defying normal human inhibition. But, what matters above all, when it comes to what they can achieve in office, and how their legacy will be remembered, is whether their self-regard is matched by competence and essential decency. We’ve had some striking examples in Australia within living memory of non-shrinking-violets who make interesting case studies in this respect. I am thinking in particular of four larger-than-life characters whom I’ve known well in recent decades: Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.

Hawke’s love of everything about himself was legendary. And I mean everything, as those of us can attest who’ve had the pleasure of arriving at his hotel room late in the evening to brief him before some event to be greeted by the great man in his birthday suit. But self-absorbed as he was, Hawke did have decent values that were very real – not least an abiding passion for the underdog, a respect for his political opponents and a total commitment to a co-operative approach to problem-solving, all of which admirably served both the country and his legacy.

Keating has been often accused of overweening arrogance, but I believe this was always more a function of self-confidence than Trumpian-style narcissism. And, like Hawke, he was motivated by a very strong sense of decency in his approach to public-policy making – with that, perhaps, most prominently on display with his Redfern speech of 1992, empathetically apologising to Indigenous Australians for all the wrongs done to them in the past, “and our failure to imagine these things being done to us”. His language could certainly be cruel, though just about always leavened with a style and wit rather beyond Hawke’s range: I remember fondly some of his less well-known sallies, in particular his description in the Cabinet Room on one occasion of a particular opponent as having “all the charm of a used suppository”. Keating was generally a much more multi-faceted character than Hawke: I once described him to an American audience, in terms I hoped they might understand, as a combination of Franklin Roosevelt, Mike Tyson, Leonard Bernstein and Lenny Bruce – statesman, bruiser, aesthete and foul-mouthed comedian. They don’t make them like that any more.

Rudd was, again, a complex mix. He remains probably the smartest person I have ever come across in public life (not a judgment with which I think he would be inclined to quarrel), with a great capacity for policy analysis and advocacy. Those talents were abundantly on display internationally, for example, in the central role he played in working with Barack Obama and others to craft a way through the global financial crisis. The trouble was that he combined that with a famously dysfunctional approach to government management, too often showing a lack of empathy with the needs of his senior colleagues and public servants. But I do believe Rudd has always had a genuine store of decent values, for all that he sometimes kept them well-hidden, or abandoned them under stress – again most vividly on display with his Stolen Generations apology which, as Tony Abbott as Liberal leader acknowledged, “movingly evoked… the stain on our soul”.

Turnbull was another of our leaders with a Trump-like conviction that he was always the smartest person in room, and he was usually right (though he always claims, quite indefensibly, that I contested that whenever we met…). But Turnbull accompanied his self-confidence with an unquestionable constellation of genuinely decent personal values, most obviously on gender and climate-related issues. His tragedy in office was that he too often suppressed those values for the sake of perceived internal political advantage, ending up losing support all round.

As with individuals, so too with nations. I have always strongly believed that in the conduct of international relations one should never begin to underestimate the significance of what most of the world, if not Trump, understands to be a country’s soft power: not just being respected or feared for its military and economic might (its hard power), but being, and being seen to be, the kind of country that others admire, trust, want to visit, study in, invest in, and support in a crisis – in short, a decent country.

I have been arguing since I first became foreign minister in 1988 that it is important for Australia to be, and be seen to be, what I call a good international citizen – the kind of country which is, and is seen to be, not just wholly inward-looking and self-interested, but one which genuinely cares about poverty, conflict, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation and other problems afflicting people very often in places far from our own shores, and very often having little or no direct or immediate impact on one’s own security and prosperity.

Of course, the response one often gets from political hard-heads, as I can testify from my own cabinet experience, is that all this is really just boy-scout stuff — something nice to do from time to time if there’s not much cost involved, and maybe if there is some domestic pressure group to be accommodated — but not the real business of national government. My answer always has been that we have both a moral imperative and a national interest imperative to be, and be seen to be, a good international citizen.

Moral imperative: The starting point, but not the finishing point, in making the case for good international citizenship is simply that this is the right thing to do – that states, like individuals, have a moral obligation to do the least harm, and the most good, they can. Answers will vary, depending on one’s philosophical or spiritual bent, as to what is the source of that obligation. But the striking thing is just how much convergence there is around basic principles, whether one’s approach to ethics is religiously or humanistically based, and whatever the cultural tradition in which one has been brought up.

We should think of advocates for different approaches to moral reasoning — whether Christian or Utilitarian or Kantian or Rawlsian or anything else — as a British philosopher has put it, as “climbing the same mountain from different sides”. In their different ways, the different ethical traditions, both religious and secular, all point in essentially the same direction: demanding at their core respect for our common humanity. And recognition of, and respect for, our common humanity is the moral core of the concept of good international citizenship.

National interest imperative: The other dimension of my case for good international citizenship, and one that political hard-heads tend to find more compelling, is based not on morality but the national interest: the returns are more than just warm inner glows. Everyone gets it that the traditional core business of any country’s foreign policy is how we protect and advance our national interests in two big ways: ensuring our physical security and our material prosperity. My strong belief is that there is a third dimension to any country’s national interests — being, and seen to be, a good international citizen — which should also be regarded as our core business, just as much as those two traditional dimensions, and not just an optional extra.

Decent behaviour can generate hard-headed, practical national advantage of the kind that appeals to realists — and political cynics — as well as idealists, and do so in three ways.

The first return is reputational. A country’s general image, how it projects itself — its culture, its values, its policies — and how in turn it is seen by others, is of fundamental importance in determining how well it succeeds in advancing and protecting its traditional national interests. Over many decades of active international engagement, I have witnessed, over and over, how this “soft power” — as I’ve already described it — matters. There can be no clearer case study of the impact of reputational collapse than that now being experienced by the US with Trump’s retreat from decency: tourism, overseas investment and the primacy of the dollar are all already under acute strain.

The second return from good international citizenship is reciprocity. Foreign policymakers are no more immune to ordinary human instincts than anyone else, and if I take your problems seriously, you are that much more likely to help me solve mine. The reciprocity involved is not always explicit or transparent, and subtlety will often be an advantage in achieving it. But no practising diplomat will be unaware of the reality, and utility, of this dynamic, and no government policymaker should be oblivious to it.

The third return is simply getting more stuff done – making progress on issues where the whole world does ultimately benefit, like climate change, but where the national costs for many players might seem for a long time to outweigh the benefits, and where the necessary collective international action is accordingly very hard to achieve. The more states that have a co-operative, collective, good-international citizenship mindset, the better the chance of these things getting done.

My argument that good international citizenship is both a moral imperative and a national interest imperative — that it is possible to be simultaneously both idealistic and pragmatic — might be thought by some political leaders to be too complicated a story for them to tell. My answer is to remind them of the famous admonition of Scottish Labour MP Jimmy Maxton, in the 1930s: “If tha’ can’t ride two horses at once, tha’ve no right to be in bloody circus.”

Australia’s record: Australia likes to think of itself as a good international citizen and, from time to time, has deserved to be so regarded. But only from time to time. Against the benchmarks which I think are most relevant, our overall record has been patchy at best, and lamentable at worst.

On overseas aid, we have been the worst-performed of any rich-country donor in terms of the decline in our generosity over the last five decades.

On human rights, where what happens at home very much matters abroad — nobody likes a hypocrite — our record has been at best mixed, sometimes ahead of the game, but sometimes lagging badly behind.

Our contributions to international peace and security in recent decades have been patchy. In peacemaking diplomacy, and responding to mass-atrocity crimes, we have played some important positive roles, notably in Cambodia. As international peacekeepers, we have always done well, but accepted far too few such obligations in recent years. In the case of actual warfighting, we have been at our best when making our own decision to fight just wars, lawful under the UN Charter, and at our worst — as in Vietnam or Iraq 2003 — when persuaded to go to war for less just causes in the hope of buying alliance insurance protection against possible future threats to ourselves.

In meeting our responsibilities to refugees and asylum-seekers, our record has been, at times in the past, a very proud one, but in recent years little short of shameful.

And as to helping meet the three great existential risks to life on this planet as we know it, our international performance has been underwhelming: a bare pass in the case of pandemics, and at best a bare pass again on climate change, where the lack of bipartisanship has been a serious policy inhibitor. On nuclear weapons, we have played a useful role in the past, and can again, in advancing both risk reduction and the ultimate goal of elimination, but our voice for the last decade has been largely silent.

The politics of decency: What is intriguing is that, on all the available evidence, to the extent that we have failed to live up to our self-image as a decent country, the problem lies not with the negative attitudes of our people, but too often overly cynical governments. Australian polling conducted by the Lowy Institute over the last two decades shows clear, and often overwhelming, public support for just about all my benchmark tests of good international citizenship. Aid, at first sight, seems the big exception, but on closer examination, it is anything but. People (and this is consistent with survey results in countries with whom we like to compare ourselves) think we are spending much more than we actually do, and are willing to spend more than we actually are.

When governments have taken strongly principled, good, international citizenship positions, they have had no obvious difficulty in taking the community with them. The nervousness so many of them have shown has not had any obvious political justification. Maybe these issues are not sufficiently central and salient to win elections, but there is no evidence of which I am aware that they lose them.

Overt commitment by successive Australian Governments to the concept of good international citizenship has waxed and waned over the last four decades. It was a central guiding pillar of foreign policy during the last eight years of the Hawke-Keating Government, when I was foreign minister; explicitly rejected by my successor Alexander Downer and the Howard Government, in favour of a vague commitment to “national values” as being important in our policymaking; explicitly resurrected by the Rudd and Gillard Governments of 2007-13; occasionally cited by Tony Abbott — he liked three-word mantras — but never actually applied; and dropped out of sight — neither embraced nor disavowed, just ignored — under Turnbull and Morrison.

The Albanese Government has, so far, resisted my blandishments to restore the concept of good international citizenship to centrality in our foreign policy, with Penny Wong saying she doesn’t disagree with the sentiment, but prefers to talk of Labor’s commitment to “constructive internationalism”. I’m not sure that that kind of language gets the job done.

A country with Australia’s general record and reputation as an energetic, creative, middle power, which has many times in the past played a world-leading role in international diplomacy, should be setting its sights higher. The bottom line is that we have just one planet, we are a global community, and our political leaders should give more weight, than too many of them have been willing to do, to what Abraham Lincoln famously called “the better angels of our nature”.

My own instinct is that, if the Albanese Government is returned, and if it is to be in the business, as a great many observers certainly think it should be, of articulating a clearer vision of Australia’s future — what kind of country we should aspire to be in the decades ahead — then we could do a lot worse than making a very explicit part of that vision just this: a desire for Australia to be, and be seen to be in our own region and the wider world, as a good international citizen – as a decent country.

But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Speech from the Melbourne Club library dinner, 29 April