Maximising Australia’s Memberships: Recalibrating Australia’s engagement with Indo-Pacific groups

By Hayley Channer on 09 May 2022

Indo-Pacific | Indo-Pacific Politics

In recent years, there has been an explosion of strategic groupings in the Indo-Pacific. With the addition of Quad Leaders’ Summits, AUKUS, and a new ASEAN-Australia Summit in 2021 alone, Australia now belongs to upwards of twenty separate Indo-Pacific institutions.

While many of these institutions are core to Australia’s regional engagement, some older regional groupings face declining relevance, yet they continue to compete for attention and resources with new and more effective mechanisms. 

This report, by Perth USAsia Centre Senior Policy Fellow Hayley Channer, provides a stocktake of all Australia's Indo-Pacific strategic memberships, from the Five Eyes in 1956 up to AUKUS in late 2021. It then ranks all of Australia's group memberships by their current value and potential and recommends how to resource them.  

Read the report

Read the 2 page summary



To launch the report, a webinar will be held on Thursday 12 May 2022, 2:00pm-3:00pm AWST | 4:00pm-5:00pm AEST.