Australian envoy says ties with India at historic high

livemint.com:

Edited excerpts: So, first thing to say is we are at a historically high point and the bilateral relationship has never seen as much prospect and forward movement as we’ve right now. There are three underlying drivers that are driving this bilateral relationship. One, for the first time in our history, Australia and India have a very high level of strategic alignment.

We’re partners in the Indo Pacific. Two, economics. India is now the fifth biggest economy, and growing at 7% per annum.

Any country will be interested in India. But Australia isn’t any other country. We’re a neighbour, a strategic partner, and perhaps most importantly, we have a highly complementary economy.

The third strategic driver is the very large population of Indian origin in Australia. A million people is not a lot by Indian standards but it’s nearly 4% of our population. We are at a high point, but I want to achieve more.

Fundamentally India and China should resolve this border conflict. We want to avoid an outbreak of hostilities and very much support the resolution of these differences according to law and through dialogues between the parties. This difference is long standing.

It would be a good thing, if we were able to get to a point where we thought that the prospect of conflict was minimized. We are determined to work more closely on maritime domain awareness and that’s probably where our defence interests, most obviously intersect. The focus of that is in the Northeast Indian Ocean, which is where we have greatest interest and where each of us has competency that we can deploy and utilize to each other’s benefit.