JOIN USAustralia, India are natural partners
Just hours after he was elected, in one of his first acts as Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese flew to the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Tokyo and met Prime Minister Modi.
Our Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, did the same – meeting with External Affairs Minister Jaishankar in her first days in office. And only a few days after I was sworn in as Australia’s Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, on June 6, my first international meeting was with Tamil Nadu’s Finance Minister, Palanivel Thiagarajan. These were no accidents. They were demonstrations of the priority Australia attaches to India. We’ve maintained an impressive pace of engagement. Since May, Australia has hosted eight Indian ministers.
This week, I am leading Australia’s delegation of officials, the private sector and think tanks to the Bengaluru Tech Summit – Asia’s largest technology conference – and representing Australia at the 3rd Ministerial Conference on Counter-Terrorism Financing in New Delhi.
I’m pleased to be starting my trip in India’s dynamic south where Australia has announced we will open our fifth Indian diplomatic post, with a Consulate-General in Bengaluru from 2023. Our countries have a broad and deepening relationship.
Australia and India are natural partners. Not only do we have shared interests, but we also have shared perspectives, shared democratic heritage and face shared challenges.
We share a region. And share an ambition to ensure it remains stable, secure and prosperous.
We have deepened our military cooperation, allowing for more interoperability between our defence forces.Over the past week our defence forces have been holding advanced drills in Exercise MALABAR, alongside the United States and Japan. And earlier this month the largest Australian military delegation to visit India since WWII was in Visakhapatnam for Indo-Pacific Endeavour.
We have concluded our historic Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement, to support greater trade and expand commercial opportunities between our countries.
In cyber and critical technology, our governments are working to open a Joint Australia-India Centre of Excellence for Critical and Emerging Technology Policy in Bengaluru. This Centre will draw on Indian and Australian expertise and position us at the forefront of global policy development – helping develop norms, standards and ethical frameworks for the technologies that will shape our future.
Successive governments have worked hard to build the Australia-India relationship, but this wouldn’t have been possible without a key enabler.
Personal ties across the Indian Ocean, travel in both directions for study, tourism, business and investment, a shared passion for the cricket pitch and delicious food mean that many Indians and Australians have fond connections – what we call people-to-people links.
Our people-to-people links are the lifeblood of our bilateral relationship. Australia’s Indian community is our second largest and fastest-growing overseas-born group.
As an elected representative from Melbourne’s West, I see this every day. Where people of Indian heritage are the fastest growing community in the fastest growing area of Australia.
The Indian diaspora in Australia is energetic, young, ambitious, dynamic and influential. It forms an integral part of our vibrant, multicultural democracy, and it will contribute in an outsized way to our future growth, prosperity
and security.
Deepavali, Onam, Navratri and Bathukamma are established fixtures of my community’s calendar alongside Ramadan and Christmas. Australia is committed to further empowering our Indian community to contribute to bilateral ties, and building “India literacy” among Australians more broadly.
That’s why we’re opening a new Centre for Australia-India Relations. This is an investment in the talents and energy of the Indian-Australian community. And it will
support Indian Australians to assume more prominent roles in Australia’s public institutions.
The Centre will administer ‘Maitri’ a suite of programmes to deepen education, cultural and policy links. With many commonalities and shared challenges to face, ours is a relationship that must prosper. It is in our interests, and those of our regional partners, too.
And with strong foundations and a fast-growing platform of practical cooperation, I know it will.
(The writer is Assistant
Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia)