1 - Australia’s ‘Engagement with Asia’

Summary

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.