Australia and New Zealand have long constituted a “pluralist security community”– an association containing such ingredients as mutual compatability of major values, unbroken links of social communication affecting all levels of society, a multiplicity of transactions and mutual predictability of behaviour among decision-makers. It is an association comparable with, but perhaps even stronger than, the partnership of three Scandinavian states, that between the United States and Canada or the special relationship between Britain and Ireland.

The years 1976 to 1980 were an especially dynamic period for Australian relations with the South-West Pacific. The claim for a significant role in the region which Canberra had staked during the first half of the 1970s was developed and defended with considerable vigour in the second half of the decade. And, in many respects, this expansion represented something more than a continuation of the undertakings of the previous five years. There were qualitative as well as quantitative changes in the character of Australia’s relationship with the South Pacific during the second half of the 1970s which marked a fundamental shift in the Australian view of the Islands from the preceding five years.