Australia’s relationship with China is one of its most difficult and challenging: it constitutes a crucial test of the success of Australia’s ability to engage with the region in a way which gives full expression to its energy, initiative and unique identity. While relations have continued to be both cordial and mutually beneficial, and have matured considerably, two major developments in the post–Cold War era are likely to have an enduring impact on their long-term stability. At the international level, the end of ideological confrontation between the superpowers, and of the alliance system that buttressed it, refocused the political and economic attention of both China and Australia at the regional level. At that level, the most significant development, the emergence of China as a dominant economic and military power within a region that was itself shaping up as a financial and commercial powerhouse, opened up new windows of opportunity for Australia, while at the same time highlighting asymmetries in power between China and Australia, which had hitherto been disguised by a confluence of circumstances.

In March 2008, newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced plans for a two-day national summit to be held in Canberra. The Australia 2020 Summit brought together 1000 of Australia’s ‘best and brightest brains’ to develop long-term strategic policies for Australia. Of these participants, 100 were given the task of presenting a strategic vision and recommendations on ‘Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world’. The 2020 Summit seemed to be one of the defining images of Prime Minister Rudd’s term of office from 2007 to 2010. It certainly marked a new development in the formation of Australian foreign policy. The summit was supplemented by school summits, a Youth Summit, various community summits, regional town hall forums and an open submission system that allowed all Australians directly to submit their policy ideas and recommendations. The inclusion of the broader public in a dialogue about Australia’s future role in the world was a notable departure from traditional foreign policy-making.

Compared with its relations with Asia, Australian engagement with the countries of the African continent was not extensive, and was defined even in the government’s view by a ’period of neglect’ by all sectors of government, including diplomacy, trade, aid and defence. That said, increased communication and involvement occurred in the period under reiew in this volume, as African immigration continued and as the Australian government sought African support in its bid for a United Nations Security Council seat for 2013–14. Formal government ties between Australia and the nations of Africa continued, however, to be limited. In this sense, there was little significant change in the period 2006–10 from previous periods.

There were significant changes in the quality and direction of Australia’s relations with Southeast Asia between 1990 and 1995. These changes were symbolised by the new directions set out in Foreign Minister Gareth Evans’s statement on Australia’s Regional Security of December 19891 and at the end of the period by the signing of the Australia–Indonesia Security Agreement in December 1995. The signing of this agreement signalled a historic change in Australia’s relations with Indonesia and Southeast Asia, surprising observers in both countries. Yet the seeds of that agreement lie in the groundwork of the new approach to regional security set out by Evans in 1989, and in its antecedents in earlier ’moves to Asia’ of the 1970s and 1980s.

In the early 1990s it might have been expected that the Pacific islands region would fall off the Australian policy maker’s map. This seemed plausible given Canberra’s preoccupation with Asia and the end of the perceived security problem in the South Pacific. Instead, Australian decision makers embarked on an ambitious campaign to radically transform the regional economic order. The region was almost seen as part of Australia; ’the backyard’ that needed to be brought into line with Australia’s push into Asia and with Australia’s reform agenda in the face of new global economic pressures. This move was strongly influenced by an organisational initiative to place Pacific islands affairs and development assistance under a junior Minister. While some interpreted this as a downgrading of the area in Canberra’s foreign policy priorities, it had the effect of bringing more attention and energy to the relations with the Pacific islands than if they had been left in the Foreign Minister’s hands. Under the leadership of Gordon Bilney, the South Pacific returned to the priority list in Canberra, even engaging the Prime Minister from time to time.

In areas of environmental interest to Australia, the period between 1990 and 1995 was an active one internationally. It saw Antarctica formally protected from mining or oil drilling; enhancement of global cooperation to protect the ozone layer; a substantial rise in international, including regional, interest in global climate change; and, despite (perhaps, given the adverse international reaction, because of) the renewal of nuclear testing, particularly by France in the Pacific, the development of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, on which Australia has put great emphasis. The five years also encompassed a second global environment conference, the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (the first, the UN Conference on the Human Environment, was held in Stockholm in 1972). The 1992 Rio conference can be seen in one sense as having been a valuable means of creating a greater awareness of the issues and increasing substantially the international machinery for dealing with co-operation in the environment field as well as spawning a variety of international conventions to which Australia adhered.

Writing at the beginning of the 1990s on Australia’s disarmament and arms control policies and achievements, Trevor Findlay noted that, although a relative latecomer to the field, Australia had soon become ’an assiduous, well-respected participant ... sporting a range of considered, often imaginative policies and initiatives’. In the main, however, these efforts and initiatives were concentrated in the international arena, with little cross-over into Australia’s domestic political domain. As Findlay described it: ’There is a sense in which Australia has so far tackled, and in most cases accomplished, all the "easy" arms control tasks – those initiatives which can be taken both unilaterally and with relatively little cost to Australia or the government.’ He further added that ’apart from its technical input in the CW area, the Defence Department has so far played only a minor role in shaping Australian disarmament policy,’ and speculated that ’[t]his could change as the international disarmament agenda broadens to include conventional and high-technology weapons that Defence has or plans to acquire’.

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.