As 2001 opened, security and defence issues were already more central to Australia’s national agenda, both domestically and internationally, than had typically been the case over the previous three decades. Only a few weeks before the start of 2001, on 6 December 2000, Prime Minister John Howard had tabled in Parliament a new Defence White Paper. Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force committed his government to a new and more expansive conception of Australia’s strategic interests and military objectives and to substantial and sustained increases in defence funding. These decisions were in part a prudent policy response to long-term strategic and fiscal trends stretching back a decade or more. But the tone and style as well as the content of the White Paper clearly showed that, for Howard, security was also at the centre of the government’s political agenda at the start of what was certain to be a federal election year.

When the Australia Labor Party (led at the time by Kevin Rudd) was elected to federal office in November 2007, almost two years into the period under review, many commentators anticipated a substantial and substantive change in Australia’s foreign environmental policy. The change in rhetoric before and after November 2007 was, indeed, pronounced. These were governments with apparently very different world views: Labor articulating an internationalist and multilateralist model of international relations and global governance, and the Coalition eschewing ‘ideology’ and idealism in favour of what it saw as a hard-headed realism and a willingness to walk away from multilateral opportunities that did not deliver the outcomes they wanted.

The nature of Australia’s economy and ecosystem ensures that Australian governments have taken a continued interest in the negotiations for, and implications of, most of the world’s multilateral environmental agreements. Australia has an energy-intensive economy. Agriculture and extractive industries, both of which have had severe environmental consequences, contribute significantly to export earnings. The country is both highly urbanised (around 85 per cent of the population lives in cities) and the world’s only industrialised ’mega-diverse’ country, custodian of about 10 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Australia is also one of the few industrialised countries that suffers extensive desertification – over half of the country’s land area is in need of some form of repair. Australia’s exclusive economic zone – 11 million square kilometres of marine waters – is one of the largest in the world. Australia’s environmental role in world affairs includes its domestic responses to environmental treaty obligations and its commitment to sustainable development both at home and abroad.

The prospects for Australia’s relations with its most immediate region at the beginning of the decade seemed bleak indeed. On the surface at least, they continued to be troubled as the rise of terrorism and people smuggling as major security issues, and Australia’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, introduced new sources of tension into Australia’s relations with its northern neighbours. Yet by 2005 the picture had changed remarkably. John Howard’s government, despite being dogged by diplomatic gaffes and pilloried by its critics, had achieved some remarkable successes in Australia’s relations with South-East Asia. Bilateral trade agreements had been signed or were under negotiation with the region’s major economies. Talks had begun on a new security agreement with Indonesia, and the Australian Prime Minister seemed to have forged a close rapport with the first directly elected Indonesian President. Perhaps most significantly, Howard was invited to two meetings crucial to the development of a new East Asian regional institution: the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in November 2004 and the inaugural East Asia Summit in December 2005.

The period 2006 to 2010 witnessed a renewed Australian interest in and engagement with Europe following decades of relative neglect. Australia’s close trade, foreign and security policy relationships with Asia and the United States, coupled with a European Union (EU) agricultural policy inimical to Australia’s trade interests, were major determinants of Australia’s neglect of Europe from the 1970s to the early years of the twenty-first century. A vision of Europe as protectionist, unfriendly to trade, inwardlooking and bureaucratic developed in Australia throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century. This in turn fostered a certain lack of interest in and attention to the European integration process and its increasing global importance. Within the EU Commission, Australia was regarded for much of the past 40 years as interested only in agriculture. For the greater part of this period also, the close traditional, cultural, trade and foreign and security policy ties with the United Kingdom remained Australia’s sole broadly based and close link with Europe.

The Australian economy performed surprisingly strongly throughout most of the five-year period under consideration. The performance was surprising, that is, given the troubles – concentrated in the years 1997–99 – that afflicted most East Asian economies, which together account for more than half of Australia’s exports. By the end of the five-year period, however, the triumphalism that had accompanied Australian official reaction to the Asian economic crisis began to look premature. In 1999–2000, the government had to apply the brakes (in the form of higher interest rates) to the economy largely because of external constraints: a worsening current account deficit and a depreciating currency. The economy was showing all-too-familiar signs of the stop–go pattern that had choked off growth in earlier periods. Fears were mounting that the economic growth that had occurred throughout the period – the country’s longest boom since the 1960s – was drawing to an end.

Asylum seekers, the war in Iraq, and the threat of terrorism dominated foreign policy in the first years of the twenty-first century not only in the political arena but also in the polls. Not since the 1980s and the debate about Asian immigrants had questions of immigration loomed so large; not since the Vietnam War had the deployment of Australian troops in a US-led invasion of a distant land proved so divisive; and never before had Australia had to grapple with the threat of international terrorism. Border protection and terrorism figured prominently in the run-up to the 2001 election; security issues and, to a lesser extent, the war in Iraq were factors in the election held in 2004.

Over the last quarter-century, the relations between Australia and Latin America, while not intense, clearly have thickened and deepened. And the pace of this thickening and deepening is quickening. The most obvious manifestation is in the economic realm, in trade and investment. But our research indicates that in more obscure areas, such as cultural exchange, education, and environmental issues, much is happening and there is every reason to expect that the contact will expand. That said, any informed observer of Australia’s relations with Latin America would be struck by how little each knows about the other, how recent and relatively superficial the contacts are, and consequently how tenuous they could remain unless both the Australians and the Latin Americans invest further substantial effort. This effort cannot be limited to the material – trade and investment – but must include education at all levels to overcome the barriers of language and culture, of limited transport, of competing economies, of stereotypes.

In a remarkable article published in the official journal of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 1992, the Director-General of the Economic Affairs Bureau and one of the most senior figures in the Ministry, Kazuo Ogura, wrote in an analysis of Japan’s diplomacy that only Australia could fill the role of Japan’s real partner in an Asian-Pacific regional alliance: their similar democratic values, market economies and approach to free trade, and common interests in security and political matters, gave the two countries a firm basis for a continuing and closer partnership. This view was warmly endorsed by Australia’s Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, as echoing his own remarks about Australia being a natural ally of Japan, and was enthusiastically taken up by the Australian press in terms of the opportunity and challenge presented to Australia.

During the early 1990s Australians reviewed their relationship to Asia not only in economic and strategic terms, but also in a broad cultural context. In a sense, Australian identity had always been defined in relation to Asia. The European settlers were aware of their remoteness from the old world and their proximity to people who seemed different to them in exotic and sometimes threatening ways. The ideal of ’White Australia’ had announced a determination to develop an Australian society independently of the new national societies being formed elsewhere in the region. The so-called ’multicultural’ Australia, promoted in the 1970s and 1980s, made claims to be inclusive of non-Western cultures – yet the underpinning ideology was derived from elements of Western liberalism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some Australians began to think of their country in different terms again, asking whether it might be possible to consider Australia as in some sense ’Asian’. By 1996, a consensus appeared to emerge to the effect that, although Australians ought to engage vigorously with Asian societies, Australia itself could not convincingly be described as an ’Asian’ country.