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).

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.

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.’

After the chronic political instability that marked the conservative collapse and then the feverish pace of the truncated Whitlam regime, the ensuing years present an outward appearance of equilibrium. Between 1975 and 1991 there was just one change of government, and two prime ministers held office for roughly equal terms. Both in their own ways were striving for the security the electorate desired, and both held to the middle ground. Yet in the circumstances that now prevailed there could be no security without upsetting the ingrained habits of the past. One prime minister preferred confrontation and the other consensus as the way to bring change, but the changes were never sufficient. There was always a need to go further, to abandon yet another outmoded practice and make additional improvements. The first of the leaders was Malcolm Fraser, who headed a Liberal–National Country Party coalition from 1975 to 1983. In 1983 the voters rejected him for a new Labor leader, Bob Hawke. Both leaders searched for solutions. In the absence of older certainties, governments sought to restore national cohesion and purpose. Most of all, they tried to repair an economy that no longer provided reliable growth and regular employment.

What was the environmental impact of the booming petroleum industry? It looked minimal from the vantage point of most political observers. The exception was that of the environmentalists who pointed out that the oil would generate airborne acid rain that was damaging to the environment. The question of how to deal with acid rain turned into a formative environmental debate as the underlying question addressed the future of an oil-driven industrialization of Norway. How one viewed the petroleum industry was dependant upon which rationality and whose knowledge one trusted in visioning the best future for the nation and the world. The work of the geologist Ivan Th. Rosenqvist undermined the efforts of the Minister of the Environment Gro Harlem Brundtland to halt European industrial pollution of sulfuric acid, some of which ended up as acid rain in Norway. In the 1970s, his research made him an anti-environmentalist in the eyes of his opponents. Yet he claimed he cared for nature and that his scientific research was in the world’s best interest. His alleged anti-environmentalism should be understood within the context of competing socialist styles of reasoning as well as the disunities of sciences.