Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 72, no. 2, pp. 171–184 doi:10.1111/1467-8500.

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RESEARCH AND EVALUATION

Foreign and Defence Policy on Australia’s Political

Agenda, 1962–2012

Matt McDonald
University of Queensland

This paper explores the content of the Australian foreign and defence policy agenda over the
past 50 years, finding evidence of both continuity and change. Australian political leaders
have generally committed to cooperation with international institutions, wealth creation
through engagement with Asian economies in particular, and security through the American
alliance. In this period, changes in foreign policy approach either concerned marginal
issues or were driven significantly by exogenous factors: by changes in the international
environment or by global events that propelled a reconsideration of Australian foreign and
defence policy interests. However, periods of policy change and significant public attention
in – particular around the Vietnam and Iraq wars – illustrate the continued relevance of
political choices and agency. Both conflicts and debates around them ushered in changing
foreign and defence policy considerations, and both raised fundamental questions about
Australian security and independence in the context of the American alliance.

Key words: foreign policy, defence policy, policy agenda, Australia, great and powerful friends.

Diplomacy is about surviving until the next cen-
tury – politics is about surviving until Friday
afternoon. Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes Prime
Minister (A Victory for Democracy).
Foreign and defence issues occupy a para-
doxical place in domestic politics in liberal
democratic states. On the one hand, the promise
of providing for the safety and security of do-
mestic populations is usually conceived as the
highest responsibility of government: the state’s
raison d’être. Here, the nature of the social
contract suggests that states exist to provide
physical protection for their citizens in an an-
archic international system. On the other hand,
foreign policy and defence issues do not tend
to rank highly as issues upon which domes-
tic populations vote in elections, at least in
the Australian experience (see Albinski 1974;
Cheeseman and McAllister 1994; Goot 2007).
For elitist accounts of foreign policy and diplo-
macy (Robinson 2012), this is unambiguously
a good thing. As the above quote from Sir

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Australian Journal of Public Administration 
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Humphrey Appleby suggests, it is often con-
ceived appropriate that foreign policy and
diplomacy are somehow separate and sepa-
rable from ‘politics’. And dominant theoreti-
cal accounts of foreign policy in the interna-
tional realm would suggest that foreign policy
should be made on the basis of a rational cal-
culation of the national interest determined
by distributions of material power within the
international system (eg Mearsheimer and Walt
2008). In the process, these accounts sug-
gest that states are (and should be) ultimately
functionally similar: prioritizing similar sets
of issues and engaging in similar practices if
faced with similar international circumstances,
regardless of the ideological hue of elected
governments.
The following brief qualitative survey of
Australia’s foreign and defence policy agenda
both supports and challenges this dominant
account of foreign policy and international
relations. At one level, we have seen con-
sistency regarding key goals across different
172 Foreign and Defence Policy
governments, both in terms of their perceived
importance within the foreign affairs portfo-
lio and even broadly in terms of policy content.
Over the last 50 years, we have seen a consistent
commitment to Australian security and defence
as provided through the American alliance
in particular, and a consistent commitment
to the goal of wealth creation through the ex-
pansion of markets. And to the extent that we
can identify ‘turning points’ in the foreign pol-
icy agenda, these have been triggered by in-
ternational events, in particular conflicts asso-
ciated with Vietnam and the War on Terror.
Realist accounts of international relations
would view this as an endorsement of the
marginal role of ideology and domestic pol-
itics in their (rationalist) model of interstate
politics.
And yet within this period, we certainly
see political choices and ideology at work:
in the priority attached to foreign policy is-
sues, changing conceptions of national val-
ues in need of protection or advancement, and
changes in degrees of responsiveness to inter-
national norms. Labor’s political leaders con-
sistently emphasized the role within foreign
policy of the normative framework of the in-
ternational system with which the government
should engage, for example, while conservative
Prime Ministers tend to perceive (and repre-
sent) such considerations as secondary to the
direct material economic and security interests
of Australians. Ultimately, while international
events have been the most important driver of
policy agenda change (and certainly of turning
points triggered by wars in Vietnam and in the
War on Terror), dynamics of political contesta-
tion and ideology matter regarding the way in
which successive Australian governments have
viewed and approached issues of foreign policy
and defence.
This paper will first provide a brief overview
of the development of Australia’s foreign and
defence policy agenda over the past 50 years be-
fore identifying and exploring changes in that
policy agenda and outlining some reasons for
those changes. In the process, the focus here is
on policy content and implementation style of
successive governments.
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Australia’s Foreign and Defence Policy
Agenda, 1962–2012
The Decline of Britain, the Rise of Asia
It is an irony of Australian political history that
among its most Anglophile of Prime Minis-
ters, Robert Menzies, presided over a period
in which the United Kingdom increasingly dis-
engaged from Australia’s region and became
decreasingly relevant to Australia’s economic
and strategic interests (Bell 1988: chapter 3).
In the late 1940s, Britain accounted for almost
40% of Australia’s exports. Twenty years later,
this figure was barely over 10%, with Japan
displacing the UK as Australia’s largest trading
partner in 1966–7 (Lee 2006:139). Similarly,
the UK’s attempts to focus on post-WWII eco-
nomic reconstruction ensured that the 1950s
and 1960s was defined by a more insular-
looking Britain. British foreign policy interests
at that time oriented less towards the Common-
wealth and the maintenance of its international
role more generally (not least in an era of rapid
decolonization), favouring instead an attempt
to develop economic ties with the developing
European economic community. Most directly,
in the late-1960s, the British government an-
nounced that it would permanently withdraw
its military presence in Singapore.
All this was crucial for Australia as a British
colony that had long viewed British and Aus-
tralian interests (at least until WWII) as one
and the same. Indeed for the first half of the
Twentieth Century, Australian foreign policy
had largely been approached through the frame-
work of attempting to influence a common
Imperial foreign policy. The cognitive disso-
nance that British relative decline and increas-
ing regional and international disengagement
triggered seemed captured by Prime Minister
Gorton in his 1969 remark that ‘Australia would
increasingly look on its foreign relations with
Britain in the way it looked upon relations with
any foreign country’ (in Lee 2006:147).
Another core component of the shifting in-
ternational context Australia confronted in the
1960s was the increasing global significance of
the Asian region, in both security and economic

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terms. From occupying a relatively marginal
place in global affairs, Cold War conflicts
in Korea and then Vietnam, combined with
conflicts linked to decolonization and nation-
building in Indonesia and Malaysia and the
ongoing spectre of a communist and militar-
ily powerful China, placed the Asian region at
the centre point of global security concerns,
creating core challenges for Australian foreign
and defence policy practitioners in the process.
Meanwhile, rapid economic growth in Japan in
particular saw the region begin to emerge as the
engine of the global economy.
These dual dynamics created both chal-
lenges and opportunities for the Australian
governments of the 1960s. On the one hand,
they clearly created economic opportunities for
Australia, and Australia began to embrace trade
with Japan in particular, based on a (broadly
unpopular) trade agreement signed in 1958
(Gyngell and Wesley 2003:194). On the other,
Australian security concerns developed signif-
icantly. This is hardly surprising given that the
threat of Asian invasion had loomed large over
debates about Federation in the 1880s; that in-
stability in the region was increasingly viewed
through the prism of Cold War contagions of
communism; and the fear of China continued
to drive Australian strategic considerations (see
Burke 2008). And of course, for some, this fear
of the ‘Asia threat’ had been validated by Aus-
tralia’s experience in World War II.
Vietnam, Cold War Politics and the US
Alliance
The progressive withdrawal of Britain from
Australia’s geographical area, and the end to
the simple association of Australian and British
foreign policy interests had of course been pre-
saged by the events of WWII. And while Men-
zies and other Australian leaders of the 1960s
were clearly disappointed with (even disori-
ented by) the decline of Britain, this sense of
unmooring from the certainties of the past had
been offset by Australia’s embrace of another
‘great and powerful friend’ in the United States.
Throughout the 1960s, and even while attempt-
ing to convince Britain to remain engaged in
the region, in particular in Malaya (Lee 2006),
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Australia committed itself to the US alliance.
This was manifested in its successful pursuit
of the ANZUS Treaty of 1951, but also (and
more controversially) in support for US-led
military interventions in Korea and Vietnam.
This participation reflected both a commitment
to the US alliance as the cornerstone of Aus-
tralian security, and a shared embrace of a Cold
War discourse in which the growth of commu-
nist movements within other states was viewed
as part of a dangerous global contagion (see,
among others, Burke 2008: chapter 3).
If the American alliance seemed to of-
fer a degree of certainty and stability for
Australian foreign policy practitioners in the
dangerous environment of the Cold War,
the contentious politics of commitment to the
American alliance became all too apparent in
the mid-1960s. First, Opposition disunity over
the placement of American bases in Western
Australia featured prominently in 1963 elec-
tions, with Menzies exploiting that disunity to
suggest that the Opposition would jeopardize
the American alliance and therefore risk the
nation’s security (see Lee 2006:167–8). Sec-
ond, and more significantly, this disunity was
evident in response to the American decision
to wage war in Vietnam and its associated
request for military support from allies. The
Menzies government of 1965 moved rapidly to
respond to US President Johnson’s request to
provide troops to ‘support’ the government of
South Vietnam. Here too, Australian participa-
tion was presented as consistent with its inter-
ests in maintaining the alliance and in prevent-
ing the spread of communism. Support for the
intervention continued through 1966–7, when
a popular visit by Johnson helped deliver a
crushing election victory to Harold Holt’s con-
servative government over the anti-war Labor
opposition.
The late 1960s, however, saw the steady
growth of opposition to the ongoing conflict
in Vietnam and the emergence of foreign pol-
icy as a major political issue in Australian poli-
tics. A confluence of factors undermined public
support, but most significant here were the use
of conscription to bolster troop numbers over-
seas, the increasingly entrenched nature of the
conflict, the emergence of ever-more troubling

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174 Foreign and Defence Policy
questions about the legitimacy of intervention
(heightened by increasing evidence of human
rights abuses by Western troops), and indeed
America’s own movements towards the ‘Viet-
namisation’ of the conflict. President Nixon’s
articulation of the so-called Guam Doctrine in
1969 was central to this move and also raised
more fundamental questions about Australian
security and the nature of the American al-
liance. Here, Nixon argued that in case of future
conflicts, ‘we shall look to the nation directly
threatened to assume the primary responsibil-
ity of providing the manpower for its defense’.
Aside from suggesting a less-engaged or inter-
ventionist American foreign policy in the re-
gion, this position also saw the beginning of a
major debate about Australia’s defence forces.
This debate focused on the question of whether
they should continue to be oriented towards the
strategic needs of the United States (forward
defence) or to the defence of the Australian
mainland (defence self-reliance) (Dibb 1986;
Bell 1988, chapter 5). This defence debate con-
tinued over subsequent decades, and was a fea-
ture of the politics of Australian defence in the
2000s.
The Vietnam War and the late 1960s
was therefore a crucial period for Australian
foreign policy and for the role of foreign policy
in Australian politics. This was not only due to
the fact of participation in major conflict, but
because of the fundamental questions raised
about the American alliance. Indeed debates
over the US alliance (and in particular the de-
gree of Australian independence with it) have
ultimately been at the heart of the key shifts in
Australian foreign policy, as will be noted.
International Norms: Decolonization,
Racism and Refugees
While the 1960s Australian foreign policy
agenda had been dominated by realpolitik con-
cerns regarding security alliances, the expan-
sion of markets and participation in war, the
1970s seemed to suggest the possibility of a for-
eign policy informed less by power than princi-
ple. Along with the withdrawal from Vietnam
that had begun before the turn of the decade,
the election of the Whitlam government in 1972
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seemed to signal an end to the final vestiges of
institutionalized racism in Australian domes-
tic and foreign policy. Central here were Whit-
lam’s commitments to remove the final planks
of the White Australia Policy, to move towards
independence for Australia’s colony of Papua
New Guinea, and to act in various ways to im-
prove the ‘damaging and dangerous reputation’
that Australia’s treatment of its own indigenous
population had produced (in Burke 2008:126).
In this sense, a shift in foreign policy orientation
could be seen as an extension of Whitlam’s ide-
ological agenda, but it also seemed a shift con-
sistent with the perceived need to engage more
fundamentally with international norms and the
institutions of international relations. This was
evidenced too in Whitlam’s rapid moves to rat-
ify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The idea of the Whitlam government in par-
ticular as a turning point in both perspectives on
and approaches to foreign policy issues would
accord with the broader impact of this govern-
ment on the policy agenda in Australia. Dowd-
ing et al. (2012), for example, note the Whit-
lam government’s central role in redefining the
Australian political agenda as a whole. And yet
on a range of foreign policy issues, and their
prominence on the Australian policy agenda,
the 1970s was characterized as much by con-
tinuity as change. Whitlam proved himself a
realist par excellence in engaging China in the
1970s (officially recognizing Mao’s govern-
ment several years before the US did), and in his
approach to what would be a prominent issue
on Australia’s foreign policy agenda for the fol-
lowing decades: East Timor. In a move hardly
consistent with a stated commitment to self-
determination but designed to establish strong
relations with New Order Indonesia, Whitlam’s
government indicated tacit support for Indone-
sian annexation of East Timor following Por-
tuguese withdrawal in 1975. This became the
bipartisan policy on East Timor, even after the
covert Indonesian invasion and the associated
deaths of five Australian journalists in the bor-
der town of Balibo.
Far from a revolution in foreign policy, then,
the Whitlam years demonstrated consistency
on fundamental issues, and (significantly) bi-
partisanship on key foreign policy decisions.

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Movements to withdraw from military opera-
tions in Vietnam, to pursue independence for
Papua New Guinea and to end the White Aus-
tralia Policy had all been made under the pre-
vious governments of Holt and Gorton, for
example, even while accelerated rapidly un-
der Whitlam. And even under the conserva-
tive Fraser government of the latter part of the
1970s, Australia’s commitment to ‘purposes
beyond ourselves’ (Dunne and McDonald eds.
2013) was suggested in further pressure on
Apartheid South Africa and the acceptance of
tens of thousands of Indochinese refugees. In-
deed by some accounts, the realpolitik move
of engaging Mao’s China was the most signifi-
cant shift in foreign policy under Whitlam, one
that moved away from a conceptualization of
China as threat and became the basis for subse-
quent policy (see Lee 2006:209). As structural
problems began to show themselves in both the
domestic and international economy with the
stagflation of the 1970s, however, the Whit-
lam and Fraser government’s attention turned
inwards, with foreign policy becoming even
less prominent on Australia’s policy agenda.
This would accord with Dowding et al’s (2010)
suggestion that foreign policy declined from
the political agenda following the conflict in
Vietnam. And it was a trend that was to con-
tinue into the 1980s and 1990s.
Economic Challenges and Engagement with
Asia
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed something of
a low point in attention to foreign policy in
Australian politics. As noted, this reflected the
apparent need to focus on domestic economic
issues, but it also arguably reflected a period in
which Australia enjoyed relative regional and
international stability. Certainly, the absence
of Australian participation in significant mil-
itary action in this period (excepting the first
Gulf War and Australia’s ‘peacekeeping’ mis-
sion in East Timor, both of which were rela-
tively brief commitments that enjoyed bipar-
tisan support) helped keep this issue off the
political agenda. The Hawke-Labor govern-
ments of the 1980s-1990s were largely fo-
cused on two foreign policy issues: consoli-
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175
dating strong relations with the ever-growing
economies of East Asia, and engaging com-
prehensively with the norms of the interna-
tional system and multilateral fora more gen-
erally (see Evans and Grant 1995). The latter
tied into the notion of ‘good international cit-
izenship’, envisaged by then-Foreign Minister
Gareth Evans as a foreign policy orientation
focused on projecting progressive Australian
values in foreign policy and developing Aus-
tralia’s reputation as a concerned and engaged
member of an international society. It was, for
Evans, an approach to foreign policy borne of
the realities of global interdependence and do-
mestic expectations that Australia embrace an
international role consistent with the values and
beliefs of Australians (Evans 1990).
The scale of economic growth in the East
Asian region in the 1980s and 1990s strongly
influenced Australian foreign policy considera-
tions at the time. Japan had retained its place as
Australia’s most important trading partner, with
Australia’s best terms of trade, while the rapid
development of the ‘tiger’ economies of Singa-
pore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong all
provided economic opportunities for Australia.
These were most aggressively pursued under
the Hawke and Keating governments and their
Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. Hawke spear-
headed the movement to establish APEC (Asia
Pacific Economic Cooperation) to institution-
alize a place for Australia at the Asian eco-
nomic ‘table’, while Keating continued the pur-
suit of a formal involvement of Australia in the
region’s institutions and (more controversially)
declared Australia ‘part of Asia’ (see Keating
2000). This latter commitment mirrored a
broader attempt on Keating’s part to unmoor
Australian identity from its membership of the
‘West’ and its deference to the motherland, evi-
denced most directly in Keating’s push to estab-
lish a Republic. This arguably precipitated one
of the most prominent debates about Australia’s
international identity, with the conservative
Howard government elected in 1996 adamant
that Australia did not have to make a choice be-
tween ‘history and geography’.1 For Howard,
it was possible to continue to engage the re-
gion economically whilst refocusing on the pri-
macy of the American alliance and embracing

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176 Foreign and Defence Policy
Australia’s cultural heritage as a ‘Western’ state
(see Johnson 2007; Gorjao 2003).
As East Asian economic growth had strongly
influenced Australia’s engagement with the re-
gion, so too did the Asian financial crisis of the
late 1990s precipitate a recalibration of Aus-
tralia’s approach to the region. In general terms,
the crisis provided some support to Howard
in his emphasis on more traditional Australian
foreign policy concerns and his claim that Aus-
tralia did not need to commit itself so directly
to the Asian region. More specifically, Indone-
sian political instability triggered by the crisis
and President Suharto’s subsequent resignation
created an opportunity for Australia to revisit
its long-term commitment to relations with In-
donesia over its occupation of – and human
rights abuses in – East Timor. Ultimately, it was
Howard’s conservative government that parted
ways with preceding governments in leading
a popular peacekeeping operation to oversee
the movement to independence in East Timor,
one that bore many of the hallmarks of a hu-
manitarian intervention (see Wheeler 2000). In
the process, however, the government’s actions
were less an indication of a change in ideo-
logical perspective on foreign policy than a
response to an historical opportunity to address
a contentious issue on Australia’s human rights
agenda.
Terrorism and the Transnational Agenda
The new millennium saw Australian foreign
and defence policy again emerge as a major po-
litical issue after decades on the political side-
lines, and the period between 2001 and 2005
can be viewed as a turning point in Australia’s
policy agenda. The newfound attention to for-
eign and defence policy was, of course, pre-
cipitated by the terrorist attacks of 2001 and
the subsequent War on Terror. Prime Minister
Howard’s commitment to strong support for the
United States was clearly evident in the days
and weeks following 9/11, but was to reach
its apogee with active Australian participation
in the military intervention in Iraq: the first
conflict without bipartisan support in Australia
since Vietnam.
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John Howard’s commitment to solidarity
with the United States post-9/11 was consis-
tent with his statements on coming to power, in
which he and Foreign Minister Downer sug-
gested that the alliance had been badly ne-
glected under the previous Labor government.
In the days following 9/11, Howard declared
that the attacks constituted an attack on values
shared with Australia, and (controversially) in-
voked the ANZUS alliance (conventionally in-
terpreted as applying to military action in the
Pacific) in declaring support for military in-
tervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan
(McDonald 2005). The 9/11 attacks, the in-
tervention in Afghanistan and Australia’s on-
going military blockade of a vessel carrying
asylum-seekers (the Tampa) ultimately cast a
powerful shadow over the election that fol-
lowed only weeks later, giving foreign policy
issues an electoral prominence they had not en-
joyed since the early 1970s (Marr and Wilkin-
son 2002; McAllister 2003).
The prominence of foreign and defence pol-
icy issues continued in the years following, not
only with ongoing intervention in Afghanistan,
but also with the emphasis on counter-terrorism
action at home and abroad, particularly after
the Bali bombings of 2002. This attack, perpe-
trated by the radical jihadi Islamist group Je-
maah Islamiah and killing 202 people (includ-
ing 88 Australians), was invoked by Howard
as one among a series of reasons that Aus-
tralians should support military action in Iraq
(McDonald and Merefield 2010). The legiti-
macy of this conflict split the Australian pop-
ulation, and saw the first military intervention
without bipartisan support since the Vietnam
War. The Labor Opposition sought (unsuccess-
fully) to exploit this in the lead up to the 2004
election, and in particular to draw attention
to the lack of independence in Australia’s ap-
proach to the American alliance.
By 2007, foreign policy occupied a far less
prominent place on the Australian political
agenda, with only the issue of ratification of
the Kyoto Protocol on climate change featuring
significantly in domestic debate in the lead up
to that year’s election. Certainly, the varying
positions of the Howard Government and the
Labor Opposition led by Kevin Rudd were

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significant on this point, reflecting different
views of climate change as an issue and a
different approach to engagement with the
norms of international society (see McDonald
2012). Ultimately, however, domestic political
issues (eg industrial relations policy) occupied
a more prominent position in the 2007 election.
The Labor governments of Rudd and Gillard
continued the Labor trend of engaging more
substantively with multilateral fora, but
they also emphasized strong support for the
American alliance and continued economic
engagement with the burgeoning economies
of Asia, particularly China and India. The
Australia in the Asian Century White Paper,
released in 2012, suggested that Australia’s
economic future depended on its capacity
to forge ever closer ties with the growing
economies of the region. ‘Australia’, the White
Paper suggested (2012: 1), ‘is located in the
right place at the right time – in the Asian
region in the Asian century’.
Australian Foreign and Defence Policy and
Changes in the Policy Agenda
Inevitably, there have been changes in imple-
mentation style in Australian foreign and de-
fence policy over the past 50 years, and the
level of policy attention to foreign and defence
policy has waxed and waned over that time. For
the most part, changes in policy attention and
content have been incremental, largely reflect-
ing the twists and turns of international events,
shifts in global distributions of power, and the
shifting sands of the international normative
context. All of these exogenous dynamics were
affected, of course, by endogenous ones rele-
vant to implementation style: Australia’s own
changing capacities, and the ideological per-
spective of different governments that encour-
aged greater (and particular types of) engage-
ment with some issues relative to others.
The significance of ideology as a variable
explaining patterns of agenda change should
not be overstated, however, as evidenced by
Whitlam’s embrace of realpolitik in relations
with key regional states Indonesia and China.
Indeed Australia’s experience would seem to
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177
suggest that ideology largely functions to guide
responses to more marginal issues on the inter-
national agenda: engagement with the UN sys-
tem, transnational agreements on issues such
as climate change or nuclear proliferation, or
cultural representations of Australian foreign
and defence policy in terms of its interna-
tional identity (see Gorjao 2003). Such an in-
terpretation would suggest that while we may
see prominent attempts to differentiate between
governments on foreign policy perspectives and
approaches,2 the contours of Australian foreign
policy are more indicative of continuity than
change, excepting the turning points associated
with Vietnam and the Iraq War (to be noted).
While not the central focus of this pa-
per, it is worth noting here that in terms of
policy attention accorded to foreign and de-
fence issues on the Australian political agenda,
Dowding et al.’s (2010) analysis of Governors-
General speeches reveals ‘a secular decrease
in the attention accorded to . . . international
affairs and defence’ (Dowding et al. 2010:
554). While ‘international affairs and foreign
aid’ and ‘defence’ occupied over 15% each
of the Governor-General’s speech in 1964, for
example, from the 1970s onwards these fig-
ures remained below this proportion until the
early part of the 2000s (Dowding et al. 2010:
542). A similar conclusion can also be reached
through an analysis of Prime Ministers’ elec-
tion speeches. This shows a relative decline
in references to ‘war’ and ‘defence’ post-
1972, with the latter disappearing almost alto-
gether in 1990s, returning (along with the term
‘terrorism’) in 2001 and 2004. Reference to
Australia’s foreign affairs in general also drops
away significantly from the mid-1970s: there
are more references to the term ‘foreign’ in the
election speeches of Prime Ministerial candi-
dates in 1972 and 1974 than in the subsequent
thirteen elections combined. Again, this anal-
ysis suggests that the profile of foreign policy
and defence on the Australian policy agenda
as a whole has been marginal over the past
50 years except in times of (controversial) par-
ticipation in international conflict.
Ultimately, the content of Australia’s pol-
icy, along with the prominence of these is-
sues on the national agenda more broadly, can

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178 Foreign and Defence Policy
largely be characterized by continuity rather
than change. Certainly, points of difference in
public and policy attention can be seen over
time, and points of ideological difference be-
tween governments were emphasized at vari-
ous points. The former tended to flare over ex-
ternal events in which an Australian response
was mooted or expected. In the 1980s-1990s,
for example, foreign policy issues found their
way into public debate through incidents/events
such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square mas-
sacre, the 1st Gulf War of 1991, the 1992 UN
Conference on Environment and Development
(the ‘Earth Summit’) in Rio de Janeiro, French
nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1995, the Asian
Financial Crisis of 1997–8 and East Timor in
1999. While these issues saw a ‘flare’ in atten-
tion, they were not (with the possible exception
of East Timor, to be discussed in the follow-
ing section) seen as necessarily triggering or
necessitating a shift in existing foreign policy.
Ideological points of difference in foreign
and defence policy can certainly be seen at var-
ious points, and were emphasized strongly by
some political leaders with reference to their
predecessors. The most obvious example of this
difference, mapping on to the so-called ‘cul-
ture wars’ of the 1990s (George and Huynh
eds. 2009), was the national interest v good
international citizenship distinction made by
the incoming Howard Government in contrast-
ing their approach to foreign policy from that
of the previous Labor Government. This in
turn reflected the issues that were addressed
on the policy agenda: while the Labor Gov-
ernment had been engaged prominently in a
range of multilateral fora associated with issues
such as nuclear proliferation, international tar-
iffs and trade and global environmental change
(see Evans and Grant 1995; Evans 1990), the
Howard government indicated that Australian
foreign policy activism would be relegated to
core issues around direct Australian strategic
and economic interests. While signaling a shift
of foreign policy emphasis this can also be in-
terpreted, as Joseph Camilleri (2003) has ar-
gued, as an attempt to differentiate the incom-
ing government’s foreign policy approach from
the previous one through the recalibration of
foreign policy language.
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At its heart, the drivers of Australian foreign
and defence policy over the last fifty years have
remained the preservation of the US alliance
as a guarantor of Australian security, and en-
gagement with the markets of the Asian region
as a means of developing the Australian econ-
omy. There have been significant periods of
disruption and contestation, however, defined
in terms of the prominence of particular issues
on Australia’s political agenda (policy content),
the way that issue was dealt with (implementa-
tion style), and its policy legacy. As noted, these
have been triggered by war in Vietnam and the
War on Terror, and have raised more fundamen-
tal questions about Australian security and the
American alliance.
Turning Points? Vietnam and the War on
Terror
In foreign and defence policy terms, the Viet-
nam War has been the most significant event
for Australia in the past 50 years. While Aus-
tralian fatalities from the conflict were dwarfed
by the loss of life of the World Wars, more
than 580 Australians were killed in combat op-
erations in Vietnam: approximately 90% of all
Australian casualties in war in since 1962. This
sacrifice alone is significant, but it was the con-
text and evolution of the conflict itself and
Australia’s role in it that were central to its
legacy. As the conflict wore on, both the ef-
ficacy of the use of force and the legitimacy
of western participation came under intense
scrutiny. The Menzies’ government’s decision
to use conscription to bolster troop numbers
also proved to be central to the controversial
nature of the conflict, breeding divisive de-
bates about relative sacrifice within the Aus-
tralian community and exposing a generation
of young male civilians to the prospect of mili-
tary participation in an increasingly dangerous
and unpopular conflict.
In terms of foreign and defence policy more
generally, the conflict can be seen as a policy
turning point in a number of senses. It certainly
dealt a fatal blow to conscription (which, along
with military service, fell off and remained
off the defence policy agenda), and it cre-
ated powerful scepticism within the Australian

C 2013 The Author
 McDonald
population about large-scale participation in
war (see Harper 1974:318). More significantly
in policy terms, the conflict and the evolving
American response to it precipitated a major
rethink of the structure of Australia’s defence
forces, with the emphasis shifting from forces
that enabled expeditionary warfare in support
of the superpower (forward defence) to defence
forces oriented towards the protection of Aus-
tralia itself (defence self-reliance). In part be-
cause of this, the conflict in turn compelled
Australian governments to increase their efforts
to develop their relations with neighbours in
the region, given they could no longer assume
an active American military presence in the
region. This arguably helped encourage Whit-
lam’s recognition of Mao’s China, for example,
while also providing a powerful rationale for
engaging the region generally. The conflict also
raised fundamental questions about the Ameri-
can alliance and the degree of Australian inde-
pendence within it, although this question was
not fully resolved. Indeed it was to reemerge
in the context of Australian participation in the
War on Terror.
The events of 9/11 also triggered a policy
turning point in Australian foreign and defence
policy terms, in particular Australian involve-
ment in military intervention in Afghanistan
and Iraq. US President Bush had moved quickly
to intervene in Afghanistan within two months
of the attacks, while military intervention in
Iraq was underway by early 2003. The former
conflict, of course, was undertaken with a UN
Security Council resolution, and with biparti-
san support within Parliament for an Australian
military contribution. Australian participation
in intervention in Iraq, however, did not enjoy
bipartisan support, and serious questions were
raised about both the legality and legitimacy of
intervention even before it became clear that
nuclear weapons would not be found in Iraq
and before the worst of the sectarian violence
in 2006–7.
Australian participation in the War on Terror
was less of a significant foreign policy turning
point than Vietnam, but it certainly ushered in a
changing basis for engagement with the world.
This is particularly the case if the War on Terror
is viewed not simply as military engagement in
Australian Journal of Public Administration 
C 2013 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia
179
Afghanistan and Iraq, but also as a broader for-
eign policy discourse: a framework of mean-
ing constituting the ways in which the Aus-
tralian government approached the world and
manifested not only in military action, but also
rhetorical statements on the threat of terror-
ism, engagement with the region and domestic
counter-terror legislation. So understood, the
War on Terror did indeed constitute a signif-
icant policy shift in the sense that it came to
provide a lens through which a wide range of
issues, threats and institutions were to be dealt
with. It dominated approaches to neighbouring
states, particularly after the 2002 Bali bomb-
ings, with the Australian government increas-
ingly conceiving of states such as Indonesia as
sources of threat (see McDonald 2005). The
War on Terror also saw security concerns in-
creasingly dominate Australian foreign policy
and even domestic politics. Some commenta-
tors suggested that the desire to retain close
relations with the US after 9/11 had encour-
aged Australia to enter into an economically
deleterious free trade agreement (Weiss et al.
2004), while others pointed to the dominance of
security concerns over concerns for civil liber-
ties (Hocking 2004; Gelber 2011), humanitar-
ian obligations to asylum-seekers (McDonald
2005) or the broader inclusivity of Australian
identity (eg Hage 2003).
Australian participation in the War on Terror
also undermined Australia’s engagement with
the institutions of the United Nations, with the
Howard government suggesting that the failure
to sanction military intervention in Iraq brought
into question the legitimacy of the institution it-
self (in McDonald and Merefield 2010). And
while the subsequent Australian government’s
success in being elected to the UN Security
Council in 2012 can be viewed as evidence of
a movement back into the UN fold, the War on
Terror discourse has proved resilient in continu-
ing to encourage approaches to foreign and de-
fence policy issues as disparate as the commit-
ment to the military operation in Afghanistan,
the focus of Australian Official Development
Assistance (ODA)3 and Australia’s approach to
asylum-seekers (see McDonald 2011).
These ‘turning points’ in Australian for-
eign and defence policy terms were therefore

C 2013 The Author
180 Foreign and Defence Policy
significant in terms of the content of policy
agenda. At their heart, both oriented around
the same fundamental question: to what extent
did a commitment to the US alliance compel
Australian support for expeditionary military
action when requested by our ‘great and pow-
erful friend’? Both governments of the day re-
sponded in the affirmative, with Foreign Min-
ister Downer arguing one year after the onset of
the Iraq conflict that Australian military inter-
vention was required because it was not a point
of time at which Australia could risk ‘a great
and historic breach’ with the US (in McDonald
2005).
Conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq were also
significant in terms of their prominence on
the Australian political agenda more broadly.
Both triggered large-scale political mobiliza-
tion, involving significant protests before (Iraq)
or during (Vietnam) the conflict itself. Even
a cursory glance at indicators of the signifi-
cance of foreign and defence policy issues (eg
Dowding et al 2010) illustrates the prominence
of these issues on the Australian policy agenda
at these times relative to others. While suggest-
ing that Australians are not – broadly speak-
ing – engaged in foreign policy considerations,
Gyngell and Wesley (2003:193–4) also argued
that those elections in which foreign policy fea-
tured significantly were the ‘war’ elections of
1966, 1969 and 1972 (Vietnam) and 2001 (War
on Terror). And while the question of biparti-
sanship will be addressed in more detail in the
following section, it is significant to note here
that divisions within (Labor) opposition regard-
ing the US alliance and the appropriateness of
Australia’s embrace of it were exploited suc-
cessfully by incumbent governments in 1963
and 2004.
Explaining Change? Events, Framing and
Partisanship
The above account implies that major change in
Australia’s foreign and defence policy agenda
can largely be explained on the basis of the im-
pact of events. Such a narrative might suggest
that for marginal players in the international
system, significant changes in the distribution
Australian Journal of Public Administration 
C 2013 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia
June 2013
of power, normative framework or actions of a
hegemon could all compel policy change.
In the Australian experience, the 9/11 at-
tacks and the US decision to pursue military
force in Vietnam clearly triggered the Aus-
tralian responses of engaging the War on Terror
and committing to military action in Vietnam.
These, in turn, constituted turning points in the
Australian foreign and defence policy agenda,
ushering in new approaches to defence orga-
nization, the (expeditionary) use of force, re-
gional relationships and domestic approaches
to the ‘threat within’, for example. Yet to con-
clude that these events themselves compelled
major shifts in the content or prominence of
foreign and defence policy is to underestimate
the importance of the meaning given to these
events in public debate and the political choices
involved in responding as Australian govern-
ments of the day did. This section reflects on
these processes of framing and political choice,
touching also on the role of partisanship as a
key determinant of the extent to which foreign
policy issues come to occupy prominent places
in the policy agenda more broadly.
In literature on foreign policy and interna-
tional relations, framing is often approached
through constructivist scholarship that attempts
to make sense of foreign policy as a site of con-
testation and negotiation between different ac-
tors attempting to promote particular issues and
particular responses to them (see McDonald
2008). In his analysis of the processes through
which foreign and security policy is justified
to key constituents, for example, Michael Bar-
nett (1999:14) suggests (drawing on McAdam
et al. 1996) that framing can be understood as
‘conscious strategic efforts by groups of people
to fashion shared understandings of the world
and of themselves that legitimate collective ac-
tion’. He uses the example of Yijtak Rabin’s
attempts to ‘sell’ Palestinian concessions to the
Israeli population in the lead up to the Oslo
Accords as consistent with a (nascent) liberal
democratic narrative of Israeli identity.
An analysis of this type is particularly rel-
evant to the question of Australia’s response
to conflict in Vietnam and the 9/11 attacks,
particularly in the lead up to the Iraq War. In-
deed a range of constructivist scholarship in

C 2013 The Author
 McDonald
international relations has pointed to the ways
in which national identity narratives were in-
voked to help justify military intervention in
Iraq in the US (eg Western 2005; Cramer 2007),
UK (eg Holland 2012) and Australia (eg Mc-
Donald 2010). In the instances of both Vietnam
and Iraq, Australia’s political leaders framed
conflict as part of a broader ideological strug-
gle (the Cold War and the War on Terror),
military participation as a natural extension
of Australia’s obligations, and participation as
crucial for securing the American alliance and
with it, Australia’s security. These accounts
were clearly central to the rationale for partici-
pation in conflict, yet we know with the benefit
of hindsight that they reflected choices to re-
spond and interpret events in particular ways.
Framing the Vietnam War in this way involved
a political choice to interpret the events there
as part of the Cold War rather than an inter-
nal conflict; and to view Australian participa-
tion in this conflict as both an obligation under
the terms of the alliance and necessary to se-
cure the alliance (see Burke 2008: 112–8; Bell
1986: 79–80). Similarly, the decision to em-
brace the War on Terror and frame Australian
participation in conflict in Iraq as necessary
involved political choices to view 9/11 as the
start of a war rather than a criminal act, for
example; to view sacrifices to domestic civil
liberties, regional relationships and Australia’s
relations with the UN as necessary in this ‘new
era’; and again to view military participation
in Afghanistan and Iraq as necessary to secure
the alliance and Australian security (McDonald
and Merefield 2010). In making these choices
we can see a continued role for ideology, even if
on core policy areas it appears to become polit-
ically significant only at moments of apparent
crisis.
Australian governments making these deci-
sions were initially successful in legitimating
intervention to the Australian population (see
McDonald and Merefield 2010), although in
both cases the legitimacy of the conflict itself
came under question as the conflict/occupation
wore on. And in both cases, what elevated these
issues to the highest level of attention on the
political agenda were the political fissures they
unearthed regarding the (usually bipartisan) ap-
Australian Journal of Public Administration 
C 2013 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia
181
proach to the core dimension of foreign pol-
icy: the US alliance. This made processes of
framing more politically important, and in both
cases the open contestation between govern-
ment and opposition over the content of policy
on an issue as consequential as the American
alliance and Australia’s security served to ele-
vate that issue to the highest level of political
debate. As Dowding et al. (forthcoming) sug-
gest, this was heightened by electoral politics
in which government and opposition attempted
to exploit a perceived position of electoral
advantage.
The issue of East Timor provides a useful
illustration of the politics of attention to for-
eign policy issues in the Australian context,
and in particular the central role of partisanship
in influencing the prominence of issues on the
policy agenda more broadly. East Timor raised
the profile of international issues/foreign pol-
icy issues in the public mind at points of non-
intervention (1975) and intervention (1999),
and raised questions at both times about the
core drivers of foreign policy under those gov-
ernments. While the Whitlam government had
outlined an ‘ethical’ turn in foreign policy
before acquiescing to Indonesian annexation
of East Timor, the Howard government had
downplayed notions of Australian obligations
to outsiders before subsequently overseeing the
largest peacekeeping operation in Australia’s
history. In these instances, bipartisan support
for the substance of foreign policy blunted the
impact of this issue on the Australian policy
agenda more broadly both then and throughout
the 1970s-1990s, even if East Timor remained
a prominent issue in Australian foreign policy
debate.
The above analysis suggests that partisan
politics is necessary for mobilizing foreign
policy onto the broader political agenda and
into broader public debate. The media and the
Australian public certainly played a prominent
role in political contestation over Vietnam and
Iraq, but excepting perceived moments of ‘cri-
sis’, popular engagement in foreign policy is-
sues is not a prominent driver of the foreign
policy agenda. Vocal and activist mobiliza-
tion against the passage of a relatively main-
stream carbon tax in Australia, with widespread

C 2013 The Author
182 Foreign and Defence Policy
media reporting of this issue, stands in contrast
to Australians’ and media attention to almost
all foreign policy issues, including those with
significant implications for global politics and
human rights (see Manne 2012). Such a con-
clusion would endorse Gyngell and Wesley’s
(2003:191) claim that: ‘the weight of public
opinion research conducted on international af-
fairs bears witness to the low relative priority
attached to external affairs by the vast major-
ity of the public, other than during significant
foreign policy crises’. Although it might also
be noted here that the decision to frame some
events/dynamics as a crisis (eg 9/11) relative
to others (eg climate change) also suggests
a central role for the political representation
and construction of foreign and defence policy
issues.
Conclusion
In terms of policy content and implemen-
tation style in its foreign policy, the binary
of continuity/change is one that characterizes
many accounts of Australian foreign and de-
fence policy. The question here is whether
Australian foreign policy shifts ground with
new governments attempting to outline distinc-
tive approaches and new issue areas for fo-
cus, or whether the fundamentals of Australian
foreign policy – security through the American
alliance and economic development through
Asian engagement – ultimately remain the
same, with points of difference amounting to
little more than promoting action in boutique
issue areas or tinkering at the edges of Aus-
tralia’s more fundamental foreign and security
interests (see Burke 2008).
And of course in the background to this are
events and developments in the dynamics of
global politics that seem to compel change. In
this context, we should recognize that the con-
tent of the foreign and defence policy agenda,
and its place on the broader political agenda,
is in part reflective of political circumstance.
The highpoint of attention to foreign policy is-
sues on the Australian policy agenda in the last
50 years – the 1960s and early 1970s – was
a period that saw Australia confronting seri-
Australian Journal of Public Administration 
C 2013 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia
June 2013
ous perceived geopolitical threats (nuclear war
or the spread of communism in the Cold War,
for example) while also trying to find its way
in the world in difficult and arguably disori-
enting circumstances. The rise of China, the
growing strategic and economic significance
of the region, Britain’s narrower foreign policy
focus and even the post-Vietnam scale down
of America’s role in the region all posed seri-
ous policy challenges for Australia in the area
of its foreign relations and defence arrange-
ments. By contrast, the relative physical secu-
rity of Australia and stability of geopolitics in
1980s and 1990s, combined with more estab-
lished engagement with the region and deeper
understanding of the nature of the American
alliance, arguably enabled governments of the
day to focus their attention on domestic policy
considerations.
To return to a core theme of this paper,
however, it would be wrong to sell short the im-
portance of the politics of foreign and defence
policy by assuming that Australia’s agenda
(and its role on the broader policy agenda)
is determined by exogenous forces alone.
Governments make choices about how to view
and approach the world, and how to prioritize
and frame particular issues. At crucial points
– particularly where they seem to question
the very foundation of Australian foreign and
defence policy and the required sacrifices
for keeping these foundations strong (the US
alliance) – these choices become particularly
controversial and contestable. Nowhere was
this more prominent than in the turning points
of the late 1960s/early 1970s and the early
2000s, where the absence of bipartisan support
for participation in war exposed fundamental
differences in approaches to the ‘national
interest’. These periods witnessed major shifts
in attention to foreign and defence policy
within the Australian context, and ushered in
new approaches to foreign and defence policy
by subsequent governments.
Endnotes
1. On international identity, see Devetak and
True (2006); Browning (forthcoming).

C 2013 The Author
 McDonald
2. Evident, for example, in the newly-elected
Howard Government’s derision of the notion of
‘good international citizenship’ relative to its
own commitment to the ‘national interest’ (De-
partment of Foreign Affairs and Trade 1997).
3. Kevin Rudd, for example, argued that Aus-
tralia needed to develop its aid program to the
Pacific in order to counter the post-9/11 ‘arc
of instability’ in the region, in which failed and
failing states could provide a haven for transna-
tional crime and terrorism (Hameiri 2008).
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