In the decade under review, there were signs of a lessening of outside great-power interference in regional affairs. The regional-security situation and the prospects for regional stability have in this respect provided grounds for optimism, although the situation is not entirely one which traditional Australian foreign policy in the region has sought. The long-perceived threat to regional stability posed by potential communist interference has been reduced not so much because of increased Western influence but more because of initiatives by Southeast Asian countries and, more dramatically, by the implications for world and regional affairs of the moves in the Soviet Union and China towards more open societies and towards economic priorities more responsive to free market influences. Also encouraging have been the indications from 1987 that the rivalry between these two countries was ending, although the Chinese repression of the pro-democracy movement has raised doubts about China’s development along the path to reform.

In the five years to 1970 a few Papuans and New Guineans began to share some of the anxieties of informed Australians about their country’s future place in world affairs; but in general the attention of political leaders, both indigenous and Australian, remained overwhelmingly concentrated on questions of internal development. Some basic uncertainties about Papua New Guinea’s future political status were resolved but greater uncertainties replaced them.

From time to time, the Commonwealth parliament in Canberra hears a formal ministerial statement on foreign affairs in which the minister expresses his government’s view of current international developments and lists the fundamental bases of its foreign policy. Over a period, these lists show interesting priority variations but in the case of one item, the United Nations, variation is not quite the right term. In March 1947, for example, the priorities listed by the Labor government’s Dr H. V. Evatt were: first, full support for the United Nations; second, stronger British Commonwealth ties; third, regional participation; fourth, area security arrangements with the United States and others. His successor in the Liberal-Country Party coalition government, P. C. (later Sir Percy) Spender, in his first statement of principles on 9 March 1950, raised the American security alliance to second place and dropped the United Nations to fourth, and at that hedged by reservations.

Australian policy dealing with the People’s Republic of China between 1961 and 1965 moved in traditional channels. The coalition Liberal and Country Party Federal Government was in power throughout these years and maintained formal external relationships with little innovation. This aspect of policy was stressed in 1962 by the new Minister for External Affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, when, discussing Australian foreign policy, he referred to ’the continuity of our major lines of policy’, adding that ’If our policies have been wisely conceived and steadfastly pursued, this continuing change [in international life] will not often call for more than slight corrections of the basic policy course.’ Mr Hasluck, in his first speech to Parliament as Minister for External Affairs on 23 March 1965, stressed in turn that ’I am not introducing any change in the foreign policy of the Government. The foreign policy is that of the Government, not of a person.’

Australia has been interested in the South-West Pacific and its many islands ever since the first settlement on the east coast. Their geographical proximity and economic resources particularly attracted Australian attention; the moves of other nations reminded Australia of her defence interests in the area. The determination to protect Australians from the island peoples and the missionary desire to convert the island peoples to Christianity reinforced the pressure on the colonial governments to extend Australian control. Australian interests were maintained after an expanding Europe partitioned the islands. In the 1950’s Australian interests necessitated watching both international and local developments with much the same apprehension as in 1883 when the colonial governments declared what amounted to an Australian Monroe Doctrine for the area.

On first inspection the five years from 1976 to 1980 appear to be a period of little moment in the history of Australian defence policy. No Australian servicemen were engaged in combat, no direct threat to Australia emerged even of a minor nature, no far-reaching organisational changes in the armed services or the Department of Defence took place, and relatively little new equipment found its way into the hands of the Defence Force. Moreover, the Liberal-National Country Party government retained office throughout the period, defence policy being a minor issue in the elections of 1977 and 1980, and Mr D.J. Killen remained Minister for Defence. Nor, despite early projections, did defence spending increase significantly between 1976 and 1980, fluctuating between 2.6 per cent and 2.8 per cent of Gross Domestic Product.

This Chapter is not a review of Australian foreign policy since Australia first began groping for its own national and international identity. Nor is it addressed to the policies pursued abroad by the Australian government during the last five years, which are comprehensively dealt with in the preceding chapters. It is concerned primarily with how the foreign policy decisions of the government of the day have been carried out, with or without success, by Australia’s diplomatic service, professional and amateur, since it was established (or perhaps more correctly, born again after having been aborted) some 45 ago as the new Department of External Affairs, with a separate corporate existence and mandate of its own. Rather than attempting a potted history of the Department the aim will be a brief survey of some of the more noteworthy features of its short life, including some of its achievements as well as some of the difficulties it has met and survived in the course of reaching maturity and acquiring a sense not of power but of confidence in its own ability to respond loyally and competently, at home and abroad, to the wishes of the government.

Relations between Australia and China, essentially frozen since 1950 when China’s intervention in the Korean War prevented the Menzies Government from proceeding with any plans it might have had for recognising the Chinese People’s Republic, began to alter in 1970, and by the end of 1972 diplomatic exchanges had taken place and each country’s Government was preparing to send an ambassador to the other’s capital. Recognition took place against a background of rapid changes in the international environment and with other states establishing diplomatic relations with China, but was due in greater part to a change of government in Canberra in 1972. Thereafter, the relationship has been maintained and even extended, so that China has become a point of reference in the formulation of Australian foreign policy. Even so, rather less has flowed from the relationship since formal recognition than might have been expected, given the prominence the China question had assumed over the past 20 years.

The 1970s marked a watershed in Australia’s relations with the world, a watershed which, while less dramatic than that of World War II, may well prove to be more significant and profound. Central to this process has been the reassessment of Australian–American relations and the redefining of the ANZUS treaty which took place in the years 1971–75.

The participation by the Commonwealth of Australia in international affairs requires it to enter into relations with other states and international organisations which are regulated by a body of law that is in many respects imperfectly defined and interpreted in divergent ways. Since the close of the Second World War, numerous concerted attempts have been made to settle more definitively the content of the customary law applicable in important areas of international life, and to amend that law to take account of changing political, economic and technological conditions.

Perhaps the most important question to be examined in a review of Australian defence policy during 1971–75 is how much fundamental change occurred. There is a strong prima facie case for holding that the period was the most consequential five years for Australian defence policy since the Second World War. The change of governing parties in late 1972 marked the end of an era when foreign and defence policy issues played a significant part in determining the outcome of the seven successive general elections won by the Liberal and Country Parties between 1951 and 1966. Even in 1969, Australian involvement in Vietnam was not sufficiently unpopular to unseat the Gorton Government which was troubled on many fronts. Because defence was an important electoral issue throughout the 23 years of Liberal-Country Party rule, it seemed only reasonable to expect marked changes in this area following their loss of office.

Australian policy relating to the United Nations falls into two well-marked periods. The first is that of the Labour Governments of Mr. John Curtin and Mr. J. B. Chifley, from the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of October 1944, when the foundations of the United Nations Organisation were laid, until the defeat of the federal Labour Government at the general election of December 1949; throughout that period, Dr. H. V. Evatt was Minister for External Affairs. The second period is from December 1949 until the time of writing (April 1956), when a coalition Government of the Liberal and Country parties has been in power under Mr. R. G. Menzies as Prime Minister; until May 1951, the Minister for External Affairs of that Government was Mr. (later Sir) Percy Spender, and subsequently it has been Mr. R. G. Casey, but Sir Percy Spender resigned from the Government only to become, for the rest of the period, Australian Ambassador in Washington and a frequent member, often leader, of Australian delegations to the United Nations.

Australian foreign policy during these years (1966–70) was formulated in the shadow of the powerful figure of Sir Robert Gordon Menzies who resigned as Prime Minister in 1966 after a record term of 17 years. His successor, Mr Harold Holt, followed in the Menzies tradition until his tragic death in December 1967. Mr John Gorton, a dark horse candidate for Prime Minister, held office from 10 January 1968 until his defeat for the leadership on 10 March 1971. A large measure of continuity in foreign policy was given by Mr (later Sir) Paul Hasluck who succeeded Sir Garfield Barwick as Minister for External Affairs in 1964 and held office until he became Governor-General in 1969. A professional in this field, he was succeeded by Mr Gordon Freeth whose brief tenure as minister ended with his defeat in the federal election of 1969. His successor, Mr W. McMahon, a very experienced professional politician, retained the portfolio until succeeding Mr Gorton as Prime Minister in March 1971.

A.C. Palfreeman, writing on immigration to Australia, 1971–75, in an earlier volume in this series, said: “There still existed, in accord with the classical definitions of sovereignty, the belief that the nation state should retain absolute control over the composition of its population … This showed very little erosion, either through international contractual obligations or through tacit international consensus. It remained one of the most jealously guarded powers, by the older states, by the Third World and by socialist states alike. Australia’s policies should be seen against this background.” In April 1976, a small boat containing Vietnamese refugees slipped almost unnoticed into Darwin harbour. It was just one of the flotilla that had left and has continued to leave Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, and it was the harbinger of a number of boats arriving on Australia’s northern shores in following years, bringing some 2000 ’eroders of sovereignty’ to settle here. These ’boat people’ together with those refugees arriving by the more conventional means of an intercontinental jet, numbered (by the end of 1980) some 45 000 new Indochinese settlers.

The capitulation of Japan in September 1945 marked the end of war in which more Australians had been directly involved than on any previous occasion. The Army had fought in the Middle East and South-East Asia against Germans, Italians, Vichy French and Japanese. The Air Force had contributed also to the defence of Britain and the war in Europe. The Navy had been engaged in the North Sea and the Atlantic, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Some 15 per cent of the population had enlisted in the defence forces, and many more were engaged in munitions production and other civilian war work. For the first time in its history, the continent had suffered aerial bombardment and naval shelling, while nearly six thousand Australians had died in the defence of the Australian Territory of Papua, the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, and adjacent islands. In addition, Australia was host to refugees from South-East Asia, to substantial Dutch forces, and to many hundreds of thousands of American servicemen.

There has been a perception in Australia, at least since 1945, that official relations between Australia and the US, similar to earlier relations with Britain the first ’great and powerful friend’, have been smoother under a Liberal-Country Party (LCP) government than under Labor. There is serious disagreement, however, regarding the explanation for the difference. Although it is easy to exaggerate the differences which existed between Washington and the Labor governments of the 1940s and 1970s, US–Australian relations certainly improved when the LCP returned to office in Canberra after November 1975. Yet the material basis for the close Australian–US political-strategic cooperation of the 1960s had withered away following the American defeat in Vietnam and the election of a Democrat administration in 1976. By 1978, the USA had pulled its troops out of Taiwan and Thailand, while promising to leave Korea by 1984. So, despite the resumption of military activity in Southeast Asia in 1979, the region no longer had the global significance of previous years which had made it the venue for American military action and hence close cooperation with Australia.