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In identifying the determinants of Australia's foreign aid relationship with developing countries (sometimes labelled 'the South'), this article examines the institutional history of official Australian development assistance since the Second World War. Several, often competing, narratives are delineated. These include: an ongoing questioning within the aid 'policy community', such as it is, of the purpose of foreign aid and the nature of its relationship to foreign policy; bureaucratic contestation over access to foreign aid resources; the desire of Australian foreign aid decision-makers to ensure their control, increasingly via managerialist methods, of aid delivery; and an avoidance by decision-makers of viewing the South as a politically relevant entity. Taken together, these narratives portray an aid programme that has become more 'professionalised' over time, but which finds itself institutionally inhibited from engaging meaningfully with the political nature of international development relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many states in the Global South, the Australian economy relies heavily on the natural resource sector for a large proportion of its export earnings. Four decades ago, this basic similarity eventually induced Australian governments to become 'fellow travellers' with the G77 quest for a new international economic order. When that quest was put to rest by the rise of neo-liberalism, Australian governments then became fervent believers in free rather than managed trade; but in the contemporary era where neo-liberalism is now a dying policy creed, Australia's current resource boom begs the question of whether the time is now ripe for Canberra to reinvent this role. What the rationales might be for that 'back to the future' policy move is explored in the context of Australia's iron ore trade with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]