In an end-of-term address to an ’Australian Business in Europe’ (ABIE) luncheon in London on 18 July 1990, the High Commissioner and a former Labor politician, Douglas McClelland, spoke warmly of the relationship between the two countries and especially of its value to Australia: ’Today, Australia House has an annual budget of over $23 million and the value that Australia gets for that expenditure is immeasurable. For instance, we are drawing from this country some 26 000 migrants annually, and they take with them on a conservative estimate something like $830 million. We also write some 210 000 working holiday visas and those people produce and spend in Australia. On the estimates of the Australian Tourist Commission, these working holiday people earned Australia some $310 million. British investment into Australia is running at the $45 billion mark. Britain has now restored herself to being the largest overseas investor in our country. In turn, Australian companies have invested in Britain something like $15 billion.’

Australia’s relations with Japan were profoundly influenced by the transformation of the international system that gathered momentum during the 1980s, by the changing pattern of US–Soviet rivalry, the deepening socio-economic crises confronting both superpowers, the consolidation of multipolarity, the strengthening of the EC, the emergence of other regional trading blocs, shifts in global comparative advantage, the continued rise of protectionist pressures, and the restructuring of the world’s major economies. The Australia–Japan relationship was also affected by the evolution of Washington’s ties with its major Northeast Asian ally. Between 1982–87, as US–Soviet tensions escalated, the Reagan administration sought to consolidate the United States’ strategic position in the Western Pacific, reverse the prolonged decay of the San Francisco system and reduce the staggering American regional trade imbalance though negotiation of a special relationship with Tokyo.

Australian relations with the United States were broadly peripheral in 1939. Commercial contacts were very old, dating to the beginnings of Australian settlement when Thomas Patrickson put in to Port Jackson with the Philadelphia in 1792. Yet the expansion of Australian-American trade had been gradual, and in 1939 the United States ranked only as Australia’s sixth customer, although substantial American imports made her an important source of supply. Cultural contacts, except for the films, were relatively few, and only a handful of Australians attempted post-graduate work at American universities: the main stream of students was directed towards Britain, following the well-trodden paths of Australian senior academics. Press links were primarily with London: Reuters and Australian Associated Press supplied by far the greatest volume of news, even of the Pacific and North America. American periodicals trickled through by sea mail on direct subscription. Direct cable services and information centres in New York, Chicago and San Francisco were still at the infant stage.

In retrospect, the dominant feature of the period 1966–70 was the virtual withdrawal of one of Australia’s great-power protectors, Britain, coupled with the new uncertainty over the long-term role of the other, the United States. By 1970 it was accepted that Australia faced a novel strategic situation, though there was no agreement on the appropriate response, nor had the debate on the implications of the new situation been very searching.

In pursuit of its economic interests as a growing high income country, Australia continued to play an active part in world economic affairs during the ’sixties. Hitherto largely dependent on the West – particularly the United Kingdom – for much of its development capital and trade, it has increasingly felt negative pressures from Europe fortunately offset by positive opportunities in Asia and the Pacific. There has been a diversion of an increasing proportion of its trade to these latter areas, and a ready acceptance of a growing amount of capital from North America as well as from the United Kingdom.

Australia proclaims to the world that she conducts an independent foreign policy; she has never attempted to maintain, as Switzerland has done, that her status either is or should be one of permanent neutrality. Allowing for the fact that any national policy will contain features which are peculiar to the country concerned, it can be said that Australian policy should subscribe to those general principles which may be applied to test the validity of the foreign policy of any national state which does not possess a neutral status.

In the first half of the 1970s the United Nations was accorded a higher priority in the conduct of Australian foreign policy than it had been given in the 1960s. This was partly a reflection of Labor’s emphasis on United Nations initiatives, but not entirely so. The highlight of the period was Australia’s membership of the United Nations Security Council in 1973–74, during Labor’s term of office. But the decision to seek a seat on the Security Council (after some years of avoiding our turn), and success in winning it, had occurred in 1972 under the Liberal-Country Party Government.

The 1980s were a decade of fundamental change for Australia’s relations with the South Pacific. Australia began the decade with a clear desire to exercise regional leadership, an aspiration largely accepted by the Pacific Island countries and by larger powers with interests in the area. By the end of the decade, Australia’srole was being openly challenged by the leaders of the Pacific Island states. Inplace of the earlier acceptance of Australia’s approach was a widely shared view that it was overstepping the mark. Underlying the reported joking among Pacific Island delegates to the 1990 South Pacific Forum, that Australia should be demoted from full membership to the status of other larger powers – that of dialogue partner – lay a serious message: Australia was no longer to be seen as part of the region; rather it was to be viewed as an external power with fundamentally different values and interests. Australia’s relative importance in regional affairs was further diminished by the rising influence of larger powers such as France, the United States and Japan, which began to take an active interest in the area for the first time since the Second World War.

National foreign policies, however complex the forces which go to their making, live and operate within the context of their time. Those who shape and apply policy must needs display a perceptive awareness of the essential characteristics of the international framework of the day, since those characteristics will not only prescribe the mode of procedure but also determine the limits to possible achievement. Change is of the essence of history, and international relations are no more immune from the process than other forms of human activity. This imposes on those who make decisions, and hopefully upon the communities concerned, a responsibility for detecting not simply the alchemy of change but the nature of the forces which will transmute the features dominant in one period into those dominant in the next.

Ten years ago, in 1963, de Gaulle had just succeeded in preventing Macmillan’s Britain from joining the EEC, in disregard both of the other members and of the bureaucracy of that organization. Macmillan himself had succeeded with Kennedy at Nassau in contracting for Polaris missiles with which to arm the United Kingdom’s own nuclear submarines. Kennedy’s alleged laurels of the Cuban missile crisis were still fresh, the three thermonuclear powers were negotiating a significant measure of arms control, and a brief era had begun in which it was sensible to regard the United States as the one super power.