New Delhi, Nov 27 (IANS) Australian High Commissioner to India, Philip Green, said on Friday, that the ties between India and Australia have “never been better” and lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership for taking the “dramatic steps forward.”

Terming India and Australia as close friends, the Australian diplomat said that the two nations are now working on a shared vision of Indian Ocean and stable, prosperous and free Indo-Pacific. Speaking to IANS, Green stated that India’s economy is growing fast and that is of special interest to Australia.

“Our bilateral relations have never been better. Under the period of the Modi government, there’s been really dramatic steps forward. So, I like to think of it this way: there are three underlying drivers of our bilateral relationship. We have strategic alignment now. Australia and India have always been friends, but this is now different when we’re working on a shared vision of what we want our Indian Ocean, our Indo-Pacific to be like, stable, prosperous and free,” Green told IANS.

“We have very strong high levels of economic complementarity. India’s economy is growing fast and that’s of interest to every country in the world, but it’s of special interest to Australia because we produce the sort of things that India needs for the next phase of its economic growth, whether that’s energy, minerals or metals, or skills and training. We don’t compete much with India. And then the third thing that is really driving our relations is the so-called human bridge. Now a million people of Indian origin who make Australia home, and that’s adding a very strong personal dimension to our relations,” he added.

The Australian envoy called India a “leading power” in the world and said that PM Modi has underlined and accentuated it. He called the G20 Summit held in New Delhi in 2023 a powerful demonstration of India’s arrival as a global player.

“Look, India is a leading power in the world and that has been very much underlined and accentuated by Prime Minister Modi. I arrived here two years ago in the middle of the G20 Summit and all I can tell you is that that was a powerful demonstration of India’s arrival as a global player. Not only was there a G20 which was full of new outcomes in all sorts of important fields like tech and culture and science. But, your country was the country that was able to bring all the big states of the world together in a single document that even dealt with the most complex geo-strategic issues, including the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. So, that’s just one example, but when I see Prime Minister Modi going to Australia, speaking to the large diaspora community in Australia, promoting India, giving everybody a sense of India’s great future in the world, I think it’s really been quite a remarkable transformation.”

PM Modi and Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese recently met on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in South Africa’s Johannesburg where both leaders expressed satisfaction at the deepening and diversification of cooperation between India and Australia in the last five years following elevation of the relationship to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2020.

When asked whether India has emerged as a world power under PM Modi’s leadership, the Australian Ambassador responded, “Definitely. Look, most populous country on earth, now the fastest growing large economy in the world, a country that is engaging on some of the world’s toughest issues and making headway. A country that for Australia is an indispensable partner in the Indo-Pacific. These are ways in which India is making its presence felt in a very positive way in global affairs.”

–IANS

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