By any criterion, Australia’s international human rights policy between 1996 and 2000 was fraught with contradiction. On the one hand, the Coalition government reversed decades of myopia by actively supporting self-determination for the people of East Timor, and was commended by the UN Secretary-General as a leading facilitator of the UN’s new regional strategy for enforcing the principle of humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, it adopted a regressive stance towards the traditional emphases of post-1972 Australian human rights policy by rejecting multilateralism, bipartisanship, self-criticism, and the right of UN human rights bodies to monitor Australia’s human rights conditions. Critical to this regressive mood was the government’s inability to become reconciled with the indigenous population and to respond to its demands for a national apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children.

As 2001 began, Australia’s relationship with West Asia could be characterised as one between perfect strangers. Despite regular military forays into the region, largely in support of the USA, and a burgeoning commercial relationship, the region had never been considered part of Australia’s primary area of strategic interest nor had political relations between the Australian Government and its regional counterparts ever really moved beyond occasional visits and diplomatic courtesies. Meanwhile, to the extent that Australia entered the consciousness of regional elites and the broader population, it was mainly as a supplier of primary products, such as sheep and wheat, and as a steadfast, if somewhat lower-profile, ally of the USA. In effect, there was a degree of mutual, if largely happy, ambivalence between Australia and the region.

The extent to which Australian foreign policy was reoriented between 1991 and 1995 is evident from an examination of the last edition of Australia in World Affairs. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union still loomed large in world affairs; the alliance with the United States correspondingly remained central to Australian foreign policy. Efforts by the Hawke Government to engage more closely with Asia in these years had frequently been rebuffed, so that Fedor Mediansky was able to write at the end of the decade not of closer engagement with the region, but of ’Australia’s diminished regional standing’. Australia’s ’shift towards Asia’ gathered momentum in the first half of the 1990s. Some important foundations for this trend were laid in the later 1980s, especially in immigration patterns, trade and tourism. The desirability of this shift was articulated in a range of official reports and statements, including the Fitzgerald Report on immigration, the Garnaut Report on Australia’s relations with Northeast Asia, and the Foreign Minister’s statement Australia’s Regional Security, all produced before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the definitive ending of the Cold War.

As Australian prime minister from 1996 to 2007, John Howard faced 11 tumultuous years of foreign, defence and domestic security policy challenges. As a political leader interested primarily in domestic economic issues, he faced a steep and sometimes rocky learning curve. Not surprisingly, his foreign policy legacy was mixed: partly durable and desirable, partly dubious and potentially damaging to Australia’s longterm interests. In this legacy, he is little different from his predecessors. Howard strengthened ties with the United States, adroitly avoided tensions with China, and gradually repaired relations with important Southeast Asian neighbours, including Indonesia, after periods of strain. He was also defined by his willingness to dispatch troops to foreign trouble spots, to enact far-reaching anti-terrorism legislation at home, and to substantially expand military spending on advanced new weaponry. Yet Howard largely quarantined international trade and economic interests from controversy – at least until the Australian Wheat Board Iraq bribery scandal exposed Australia’s trade policy duplicity late in the life of his government.

Key developments that began to affect international politics in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War – globalisation, humanitarian intervention at odds with previously unquestioned prerogatives of state sovereignty, and the development of multilateral institutions to manage emerging security and economic challenges – gained further momentum in the late 1990s. Paradoxically, the Australian–US relationship was both reaffirmed and tested in some very traditional ways over this period. The Howard government was elected in March 1996 with a pledge to ’reinvigorate’ that relationship, which it felt had been neglected by its Labor predecessors.

In conventional institutional terms, Australia’s role in world environmental affairs is the product of its foreign policy on regional and global environmental issues and its domestic implementation of formal treaty obligations and other commitments. Australia’s ecological profile provides good reason for governments of whatever political hue to take a keen interest in international negotiations to manage transboundary and global pollution, protect the world’s species and ecosystems, and advance the cause of sustainable development. Australia has one of the world’s most variable climates and is, with the exception of the Antarctic, the world’s driest continent. As the drought conditions that beset the country in the first half of the period under review demonstrate, the country is susceptible to water stress. Australia is one of the few industrialised countries that suffers from severe desertification, and it is the only developed country among the ten in the world that qualify as mega-diverse in their fauna and flora. As a country ‘girt by sea’, protecting the oceans from pollution and resources therein from over-exploitation is a key policy objective.

Australia devotes more diplomatic energy to its relations with the South Pacific states and Timor-Leste than their modest populations might seem to justify. Only Papua New Guinea (PNG) (6.6 million) and Timor-Leste (1.1 million) have populations of more than one million, followed by Fiji (840 000) and Solomon Islands (518 000), with the rest easily qualifying as microstates. The total population of the South Pacific region and Timor-Leste (fewer than ten million) is dwarfed by that of their regional neighbour Indonesia (240 million). Australia became more closely involved with this region and expended more diplomatic resources on it between 2005 and 2010 than at any time since the Pacific Island states first became independent. Australian troops were in continuous deployment to Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands, and were briefly sent to Tonga. A coup in Fiji, the fourth in 20 years, created a nagging diplomatic problem for the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments, which could not condone a Pacific dictatorship and yet sought to avoid a total breakdown in relations with a country of regional importance.

The five years covered by this volume were the first such period since the first half of the 1970s in which three governments held office: those of John Howard (until November 1997), Kevin Rudd (until June 2010), and Julia Gillard. The transition from a Liberal–National Party Coalition to Labor governments during this period offered observers an unusual opportunity to see the extent to which partisanship made a difference in Australian foreign policy (although the relatively small part of the period covered by this volume in which the Gillard government was in office rendered it risky to draw any firm conclusions about the direction of foreign policy under Australia’s first female prime minister).

In 1996 the Coalition government set out to define and articulate its foreign policies for Australia. In doing so it implied, and sometimes explicitly posited, some key differences between its approach and that of the preceding government. Paul Keating had been driven by grand visions. By contrast, John Howard would be commonsensical and pragmatic. Keating had been intensely concerned with Asia. Howard, while maintaining concern with Asia, would right the balance by tilting back towards the Western powers. Keating had been preoccupied with economic issues. Howard would balance economic concerns with a renewed focus on security matters. The Keating government had pursued multilateralism and middle-power activism in its quest for wider influence. The Howard government would be more interested in a revival of bilateralism, especially in the US relationship, and had few illusions about Australia’s potential for influence on the world stage; it saw ’activism’ as too often merely meddlesome, an irritant to other countries. In adumbrating these shifts the new government was, among other things, defining and presenting itself as practical, tightly focused, and above all realistic.