KEY POINTS:
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer says inter-faith dialogue has helped to halve Muslim extremism in Indonesia.
Mr Downer, a founder of the Asia-Pacific dialogues which started in Indonesia in 2004, was at Waitangi yesterday for the third dialogue meeting.
All 10 members of the Association of South-east Asian Nations plus East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia and New Zealand are attending the three-day meeting officially labelled "Building Bridges".
Delegates have been picked, and are funded, by governments, but are meant to represent diverse faiths. Four of New Zealand's 11 delegates are Christian, three are Muslim and there is one person each from the Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish faiths. Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres is also a delegate.
Indonesia's 21 delegates include a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Confucian, two Christians and the rest are Muslims.
Eight of the 10 delegates from communist Cambodia are officials in its Ministry of Cults and Religions. Cambodia will host the next meeting.
Mr Downer said the dialogues were aimed at countering "extremism" in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington and the subsequent Bali bombings in Indonesia.
"It's very important to build a coalition of moderates and people who believe in an open society - and that is most people," he said.
"In our part of the world, therefore, we should get moderate religious leaders together for them to talk and understand each other, to get to know each other."
He said moderate leaders from all religions had very strong common values and could go home and spread that message amongst their flocks.
"We've seen a growing rejection in South-east Asia of religious extremism," he said.
"This [inter-faith dialogue] is just one of a number of explanations, but there is a significant decline in support for extremism in Indonesia. There has been a halving in Indonesia in the last three years in the proportion of people who support extremism, down from 20 per cent to 10 per cent.
"I'm not attributing that to the inter-faith dialogue, but to all sorts of different factors in society."
About a third - 57 out of 164 - of the delegates this year also attended last year's meeting in the Philippines. The numbers, though small, showed that the participants were getting to know one another, Mr Downer said.
