The foreign relations of Australia have spanned from the country's time as Dominion and later Realm of the Commonwealth to become steadfastly allied with New Zealand through long-standing ANZAC ties dating back to the early 1900s, and the United States throughout the Cold War, to its engagement with Asia as a power in its own right. Its relations with the international community are influenced by its position as a leading trading nation and as a significant donor of humanitarian aid.
Australia's foreign policy is guided by a commitment to multilateralism and regionalism, as well as to strong bilateral relations with its allies. Key concerns include free trade, terrorism, economic cooperation with Asia and stability in the Asia-Pacific. Australia is active in the United Nations and the Commonwealth of Nations.
Read more about Foreign Relations Of Australia: History, International Agencies, Treaties, and Agreements, Trade, Foreign Missions, Oceania, Southeast and East Asia, Americas, Europe, South Asia and Western Asia, Africa, International Disputes
Famous quotes containing the words foreign, relations and/or australia:
“Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us to just relations with men and things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)