Japan and Australia will strengthen their security and energy ties as the Prime Ministers of both countries promote the need for peace in the Indo-Pacific. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida met in Perth on Saturday for the annual meeting of Australian-Japanese leaders. In Saturday’s talks, the two countries agreed to boost Japan’s access to hydrogen, LNG and minerals to improve energy security, while working together to achieve net zero.
Both countries will also seek to assist other countries in the Indo-Pacific in their efforts to combat climate change. As part of an updated security deal aimed at sending a message to China, Japanese soldiers will train in the Top End with their Australian counterparts. Australia and Japan to share intelligence on China as part of security deal, ambassador says
“This declaration sends a strong signal to the region about our strategic alignment,” Albanese said. He said Australians and Japanese shared a common desire for a peaceful Indo-Pacific “where democracy and human rights are respected, the rule of law prevails and disputes are resolved peacefully”. Kishida said the two countries were facing an “increasingly harsh strategic environment.” “We agreed that our special strategic partnership has advanced to a new and higher level,” he said.
It is the fourth time the Albanians and Kishida have met since Labor won the federal election in May. Kishida’s visit to Australia is the first by a Japanese prime minister since Shinzo Abe in 2018. Ahead of Saturday’s talks, Alex Bristow of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute described the mutual agreement as “hugely important”. “It makes operations much more fluid and it’s important that both Australia and Japan are US alliance partners, which increases interoperability,” Bristow said.
Energy resilience will also be a priority issue, he said, with the expectation that the two countries may be more forthcoming in explicitly expressing the need to counter Chinese aggression in the region. He said that in addition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, economic coercion used by Beijing could also be raised during the talks. On Saturday, Kishida pointed to the conflict as one of the reasons why there is now a stronger need to boost resources and energy security.
But he also warned that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine by Russia would be “an act of hostility against humanity”, adding that such weapons had not been used since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also on the agenda was the transition to clean energy and investment in new technologies to achieve net zero. “One of the biggest security challenges for our region, and indeed for the world, is obviously climate change,” Albanese said.
Australia will pump the minerals needed to build green technology into Japan as the two countries look for more ways to work together on the net-zero transition. Premier Mark McGowan will host a lunch for the state’s business community and Kishida later on Saturday.
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