New Zealand was one of the first parts of the British Empire to offer Britain help in the building of the Singapore naval base and was the only Dominion to do so. It is true that considerable financial help was given by the Straits Settlements. Hong Kong, the Federated Malay States and the Sultan of Johore. Australia's naval programme was, also, based on the assumption that the base would be built. But the Reform Party Ministry in New Zealand was the only democratically elected government which supported the United Kingdom Government with a vote of funds.

Direct diplomatic relations between New Zealand and Malaya/Singapore are a relatively recent innovation dating back only to 1955, and, significantly, the original decision to station troops in the area in peacetime preceded the establishment of formal diplomatic links. It is true that even before the Second World War there had been a growing consciousness of the strategic significance of the area, but it was seen in terms of Singapore as a link in the chain of Imperial defence, never as a region in its own right. Regions were subsumed in the worldwide defence strategy of the British Empire. Thus New Zealand contributed financially to the construction of the base for the Royal Navy at Singapore, but her military commitments were in helping to guard the Suez ‘lifeline’. New Zealand air-force units were stationed in Singapore in 1940, but despite the national trauma associated with the fall of the base and the apprehended threat to New Zealand’s own security, the ground forces remained in the Middle East. Indeed, New Zealand's formal Commonwealth responsibilities were to remain in the Middle East until 1955 and public interest continued to focus on that area to a surprising degree. The lessons of the Pacific War for New Zealand, therefore, were less concerned with the strategic importance of any particular area than with the indispensability of a United States alliance. As one research group put it, ‘in the immediate post-war years New Zealand showed a greater sense of international awareness, but no sense of particular involvement with the Far East; still less with South-East Asia.

Australian policies are usually formulated in terms of specific national interests related to Asia. These may be grouped in three categories, which I shall call security, economy, and identification. The three are separate, but point in much the same direction: in whichever of these categories an Australian views his country's future in Southeast Asia, he sees its interests as involving preservation and enlargement of Australia's present character. There is room for argument about details and interpretation, between the intellectual and the man in the street, and between one political party and another. At times these arguments are heated, especially when the question of security is being debated. But, basically, Australians want to go on being as they are in the place where they are. Although they recognize the actual and symbolic importance of Southeast Asia, their national interests demand that they be not submerged or impoverished by influences from that direction. Their position is, in essence, a defensive one, but capable of a good deal of initiative. While it is often expressed as a position involving only Southeast Asia – because that is the closest part of Asia, the one which Australians know best, and is often used as a synonym for Asia at large — the Australian position towards Asia as a whole is much the same.

Despite the undoubted significance of possible Australian participation in a five power Commonwealth security arrangement centred on Malaysia and Singapore, considerations of an Australian nuclear force, the presence of numerous American bases in Australia, and Australian policies towards a Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean, the public debate on Australian foreign policy continues to centre on the Indo-China war. This is understandable, for not only has Australia been supplying material assistance to the counter-revolutionary forces in that area since 1953, military advisers since 1962 and a task force since 1965, but the commitment has focussed critical attention on those strategic assumptions which have dominated Australian foreign policy for the last two decades.

For the past thirty years, events in Southeast Asia have substantially shaped Australian defence policy. Japan became an imminent threat only when it moved into Indo-China, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies. As a result Australians became understandably alarmed, and concentrated their defence programme on this situation rather than events in Europe, the Middle East, or even South Asia. Since World War II, a sense of continuing threat or potential threat from Asia has prompted the raising and maintaining of a regular, standing army, units of which have been deployed almost continuously since 1950 on the Asian mainland – in Korea, Malaya, Singapore and South Vietnam, as well as in northern Borneo. As this is being written, there are still Some 8,000 Australian servicemen in the Vietnam theatre, and nearly 3,000 in Malaysia and Singapore.

Will peace in Vietnam and neutralised Indochina bring stability to Southeast Asia? Or will most of the area fall under a China-North Vietnam condominium? Can the Nixon doctrine, with the U.S. nuclear deterrent in the background, assure the security of a regional association? Or will the Japanese — the flag following trade — gather Southeast Asia into a new co-prosperity sphere?

One would hardly expect New Zealand, whose population has yet to reach three million and which still exports very largely pastoral and forest products, to play a really significant part in Asian trade. Nevertheless surprise, or disappointment, may well be felt at the trifling contribution revealed by Table 1. Most of New Zealand's Asian exports go to Japan but, in 1967, were less than 1 per cent of Japan's total imports, and the remainder going to developing Asian countries were less than 1/3 per cent of their imports. New Zealand, in fact, exports more to Australia than to them, although they have a vastly bigger population and Australia has a range of export industries which compete with those of New Zealand.

To what extent can it still be argued that Australia enjoys a ‘special relationship’ with Malaysia and Singapore, and, if such a relationship exists, is its maintenance conditional upon purely strategic advantage? ‘Special relationship’ are elusive concepts in the vocabulary of international diplomacy. Presumably they require both objective and subjective proof of their existence. In other words, it would take more than an affirmation by the Malaysian and Australian governments to show that a special relationship existed between them. Demonstrations of unusual solidarity or harmony of interest would presumably be sought to test the affirmations.

Australasian universities are tied to Southeast Asia in a number of ways. The most obvious is through their teaching. Since the second world war, but more particularly in the past ten or fifteen years, this has paid more attention to Southeast Asia, its peoples, their history and their languages, than at any time since the first university institutions were founded in Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century. There are other, perhaps less obvious, ties. The teaching has been primarily at undergraduate level, but the staff members involved have, of course, been involved in research in the area. Possibly the majority would have been trained overseas, if not themselves of overseas origin; but quite recently, and especially at one or two centres, the number of graduate research students has become significant, at least in Australia. Some of the research has been published in book or monograph form by existing Australasian or overseas publishers, or by the university presses, whose numbers have augmented over the past decade.