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.

Following the establishment of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition in 1947 the Australian Government was committed definitely to an expansive policy in the Antarctic. Australia had formally accepted territorial responsibility over an area of 2,472,000 square miles, about half the Polar continent, by the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act of 13 June 1933. This area, together with territory under the governance of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, had previously been claimed by Britain. British claims, and consequently Australian claims, besides the claims of the other metropolitan powers interested in the region, have never been recognized by either the United States or the Soviet Union, and hence Australian policy-makers have had to carefully consider the official attitudes of both these world powers.

If it is true that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then it would seem that a vast heavenly bureaucracy was employed in the creation of the Indian Ocean as a geographic region. That any government should have a policy towards the Indian Ocean area is as unlikely as the region itself. It would be a bold analyst who would set out to give an account of Greenland’s relations with the Atlantic area, the latter defined as those territories – from Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego – the shores of which are washed by that ocean. My task here is no less daunting.

Before 1939, Australia invariably looked to Britain for economic leadership. Britain held a key role in the world economy, and traditionally had been Australia’s chief customer, vendor, shipper, creditor and banker and the principal reservoir of Australian immigration. Insofar as Australia had an international economic policy, therefore, it was that of strengthening and adapting existing economic ties with Britain and the British Commonwealth, to Australia’s advantage; and, when the choice was required, of maintaining British relationships at the expense of those with the rest of the world. There was very little use of economic policy as an adjunct of foreign policy, possibly because Britain was regarded also as Australia’s mainstay of defence.

Over the last decade there has been an increasing volume of writing on the politics of the Indian Ocean and its littoral states. In Australia as elsewhere, it has become de rigueur for commentators to disaggregate the larger ’Indian Ocean Region’ into a large number of relatively autonomous ’sub-regions’ the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, etc. This has allowed analysis to focus squarely upon the sub-regional sources of international conflict and to conjecture about the extent to which superpower policies towards these local conflicts do or do not come together to form a cloth of uniform warp and weft. Such an approach seems consistent with the reality of detente and the erosion of the bipolar balance of power which has hitherto regulated local conflicts more closely.

Australia moves into the 1970s facing some major readjustments in her trade policies as she reacts to events overseas and seeks to improve the workings of her own domestic economy. During the period under review Australia progressed further towards full adult status with her realistic, if somewhat grudging, acceptance of British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC); her entry into the ’big league’ of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); her start on a methodical examination of her tariff policies; and her as yet modest attempts at restructuring her primary industry to fit in better with international marketing realities. However, she has still to formulate definitive policies on problems associated with the use of her natural resources and with overseas investment; to find suitable counterweights to the effects of regional groupings on her trade; to reconcile her conflicting political and trade attitudes towards the People’s Republic of China; and to find ways of further fostering the trade of developing countries, particularly those in the Pacific region.

There are some quasi-eternal verities about Australian aid, as there are about many other Western countries’ development assistance. These are briefly that who gets the aid depends largely on the state of political relations with that country; that the growth in Australian aid annually is a function of ’incremental creep’ – that is last year’s amount plus an inflation factor; that the terms and conditions of our aid (which are good) are an outcome of a stalemate within the federal bureaucracy; that the purposes of our aid change slowly in response to changes in international thinking on development; that aid is generally not a domestic or foreign political issue, since politicians find little mileage in it with an electorate generally uninformed or else acquiescent in its humanitarian purposes.

In the 35 years since the Second World War successive Australian governments have all participated actively, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm, in the multilateral diplomacy of the United Nations, its ’Specialised Agencies’ and regional and other commissions, and the Commonwealth of Nations. Their policies in this environment have extended the scope of Australian relations through fully international cooperation while at the same time reflecting the imperatives of bilateral and regional relations.

“The honeymoon is about to be over. It has given a real sense of partnership between Australia and Japan, but now we can come down to discuss business”. According to the Japan Times, this was the message with which Mr Kiichi Miyazawa (at that time Minister for International Trade and Industry) greeted journalists on his arrival in Sydney in April 1971. This was no more than a complaint about the Australian tariff system, which discriminated against Japanese manufactures in favour of British. Such complaints were a regular feature of Australian–Japanese relations and became more frequent in the minor troughs of the Japanese business cycle that regularly followed each new peak of Japanese economic growth. “The end of the honeymoon” was, however, an arresting phrase and it was often remembered during the years that followed when, against the background of the world recession, the boundless expectations of the preceding period gave place to a more sober reality. In this paper, I shall attempt to gauge the extent of this reappraisal.