Indigenous Rights, Foreign Policy and a New Pacific, 1945–2005

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90.77% of voters agreed to remove constitutional clauses excluding Aboriginal people from the census and from federal law-making — a symbolic step toward equal citizenship, though it did not itself create land rights.

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The legal recognition that indigenous groups have rights to land based on continuous traditional connection to it, established in Australia by the 1992 Mabo decision.

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Terra nullius was the legal fiction that Australia was 'land belonging to no one' before European settlement, used to justify colonisation without treaties; Mabo rejected this doctrine and opened the way to native title claims.

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A New Zealand body established in 1975 to investigate Maori grievances over Crown breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi; its powers were extended back to 1840 itself in 1985.

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A mutual defence pact between Australia, New Zealand and the United States, marking the shift of Pacific security reliance from Britain to the US after the Second World War.

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From 1984 Lange's Labour government refused entry to nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ships, an anti-nuclear stance that led the US to suspend its ANZUS defence obligations to New Zealand (1985–1987).

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EEC membership meant Britain had to apply EEC tariffs and quotas to non-member trade, ending the guaranteed British market both countries had long relied on for meat, wool and dairy exports.

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Floating the Australian dollar (1983), cutting tariffs, and deregulating banks — reforms that opened the economy to trade and investment with rising Asian economies.

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Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, founded in 1989 on Australia's initiative, linking Pacific Rim economies — it symbolises Australia and New Zealand's reorientation from Britain toward Asia.

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Western Samoa (1962), Fiji (1970), Papua New Guinea (1975) — the first wave of Pacific decolonisation after the Second World War.

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Ethnic tension between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians (descendants of indentured labourers brought under British rule), which destabilised Fijian politics for decades after 1970.

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Australia's path ran mainly through the courts and land-rights legislation (1967 referendum, 1976 Land Rights Act, 1992 Mabo, native title); New Zealand's ran through a standing treaty mechanism, the Waitangi Tribunal, reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.