Australia's foreign policy links with Latin America: distant relations

ABSTRACT

In more recent years, Australia's relations with the countries of Latin America have taken on more importance as the trade and investment links between the two regions have grown. Besides this recent activity, Australia has a long history of diplomatic relations with the countries of Latin America, even though the links between the two regions have at times been fairly superficial. This relationship, like many others, has tended to concentrate on mainly trade relations and, despite Latin America's often turbulent political history, has not been affected much at all by political issues. The purpose of this article is to analyse the development of foreign policy links between Australia and the countries of Latin America in their formulative stage between 1901 and 1973.

KEYWORDS:

• Diplomacy
• foreign relations
• trade

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The government also incorporated an intermediate tariff between the British preferential and general tariff levels. This gave it the option of negotiating most-favoured-nation agreements with countries at the intermediate rate (Butlin, Barnard, and Pincus 1982; Reitsma 1960).

2. Treaties entered into by the UK were extended to Australia between 1901 and 1942. The UK formally lost the power to extend treaties to Australia in 1942 when Australia enacted the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act. In practice, Britain stopped extending treaties to Australia during the 1920s and 1930s. Unless denounced, treaties extended to Australia remain in force for Australia. Exceptions were the Universal Postal Union, founded in 1874, and the International Telegraph Union, founded in 1865, which the various Australian colonies and many Latin American countries joined in the late decades of the nineteenth century.

3. In the late 1950s, for instance, Australia was involved in the Washington negotiations with 11 other countries (including Chile and Argentina) on the Antarctica Treaty. The original 12 countries involved signed the treaty in December 1959.

4. Statements by the Minister for Immigration, Bill Snedden (Canberra Times, July 16, 1968, 7).