New Delhi, Nov 28 : Called India and Australia partners in building a "more stable, peaceful and prosperous" Indo-Pacific, Australia's High Commissioner to India Philip Green has reaffirmed that both countries continue to work hard on a shared vision to make Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific stable, prosperous and free.

In his detailed interview with IANS, Green said 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." He also spoke on how the two nations are working together in minerals and other sectors.

Excerpts:

IANS: How has the relationship between India and Australia progressed in recent times?

Ambassador Green: 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. 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 make Australia home and that's adding a very strong personal dimension to our relations.

IANS: Which areas of cooperation are the top priorities for both countries in the next couple of years?

Ambassador Green: Well, there's a few things that we're focusing hard on. Leaders last year set us some homework and said that we should update our long-standing defence and security statement and so we are doing that right now. We are building a new maritime security roadmap so that in this very important sphere that we are working closely together. On economics, we have an Australia-India economic roadmap which is identifying where we think the big opportunities are in our sectors and of course our trade ministers are working quite closely together on a second phase of our free trade agreement that we call CECA. So, across all of these domains and many more including education and tech, critical minerals, we have some big future hurdles to cross.

IANS: How is Australia supporting India in strengthening its role in the Indo-Pacific region?

Ambassador Green: Australia and India are very close partners in the Indo-Pacific. As I said, we share a vision about a stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific that we want to equally work together and build. So, what does that mean? It means that we support each other when we seek to bring new development capabilities to our region, whether that's in the Pacific Islands, where Australia is quite active, but where India is now providing new development support for the countries of the Pacific, whether it's in fields like maritime domain awareness, where our navies and customs and border forces can work together, we are doing that. Whether it's in trying to strengthen regional institutions like ASEAN, which we are both members of, and IORA, the Indian Ocean Regional Organisation that we're both members on. So, across a wide range of fields Australia and India are partners in trying to build a more stable, a more peaceful and a more prosperous Indo-Pacific.

IANS: Are there plans to extend cooperation in sectors like technology, minerals, and energy?

Ambassador Green: Yes, there are. So, let me take those in reverse order. In energy, we already have a very strong renewable energy partnership and the foundation stone of that is the work that we are doing to build a skills academy for the solar workforce that India needs. We've listened carefully to Prime Minister Modi's ambition of 10 million solar rooftops. My country is the country with the highest deployment per capita of solar rooftops in world. So, what are we doing about that? We are together putting together an academy in Gandhinagar which will be able to train more than 2,000 people, mostly young people, mostly women, in the technologies that they need to deploy solar rooftops. In terms of tech, this is a huge field of capability. Australia is a country with a high level of innovation and ingenuity but we don't have a large population and we are not so closely connected to global supply chains in tech in the way that India is. So, what we want to do is connect Australian tech ingenuity with Indian global capability and reach and we're doing that through firms like Infosys. And on minerals, we are already deeply into a partnership between our critical minerals office and the Ministry of Mines here. What we're seeking to do is to create a direct supply chain in critical minerals like lithium, which India needs. You're to have big demands for batteries and EE vehicles, where we produce more than 50 per cent of the world's lithium. But, we want to develop and including with the processing piece, a direct supply chain in lithium or cobalt or whatever. We're in deep discussions about how we achieve that.

IANS: Are there new scholarship opportunities or an academic collaboration plan?

Ambassador Green: There's a lot. So, many Australian universities have scholarship offerings for Indian students. And what is new is the Australian government, as a government, is now providing around 15 scholarship to students at the PhD level. This is particularly focused in STEM, so science and technology is very much foregrounded here. We want to strengthen our partnership in that field and these scholarships are a way that really high-level scholars in India can study in Australia and upgrade their skills.

IANS: What steps is Australia taking to ensure the safety and welfare of Indian students?

Ambassador Green: Well, we worked very hard on this. As you may know, Australia is one of the safest countries on Earth, and we are proud of that. We want all visitors to our country, be they Indian or be they from other countries, indeed our own people to be safe and we have a very strong and effective police force, a border force, and a very effective security intelligence agencies. We also want to make sure that Indian visitors to our country feel welcome. Now, like in many countries in Australia, there have been protests, rather loud, small numbers of people who are protesting against immigration and against multiculturalism. What I want you and your viewers to know is that our government has very clearly come out and said that we stand for continued migration into Australia in a way that is sustainable and we very much stand for a multicultural Australia in which people, wherever they come from the world, feel safe and welcome and are indeed celebrated in our society.

IANS: How has Prime Minister Modi transformed India on world stage?

Ambassador Green: 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.

IANS: Has India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, emerged as a world power?

Ambassador Green: 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: In a region that is being reshaped by strategic and economic shifts, how does Australia analyse its partnership with India evolving under the Quad?

Ambassador Green: So, we present ourselves as a country which is reliable and steadfast and seeking to build peace and prosperity and stability in our region. So, how do we do that? We do that by always looking for diplomatic and dialogue as a way of overcoming problems in our region. We provide development assistance to our region which helps the smaller economies grow. We work with countries like India in forums like ASEAN and the Indian Ocean Regional Association and in the Pacific Islands Forum in Australia because we want to strengthen the voices of small and medium-sized powers and multilateralism is a way of achieving that. Fundamentally, what a country like Australia is trying to do is to strengthen the sovereignty of small and medium-sized nations and make sure that as we are in a world where big power realities are a bit more stark, that the interests of small and medium-sized nations are fully taken into account and we find India a very valuable partner in that journey.

IANS: What is the Australia vision for ensuring stability in the Indo-Pacific?

Ambassador Green: Look, we live in a world of deeper superpower contestation and we have to deal with that in the ways of protecting our own security. But, we also want to underline the interests of small and medium-sized nations, make sure that sovereignty is fully taken into account, and use regional institutions as a way of ensuring that the rules-based framework, freedom of navigation, rules on trade remain strong because it's only in a world and in a region where the rules-based frameworks are in clear, distinct clarity that you will be able to ensure that the interests of small and medium-sized nations are properly protected.

IANS: How is Australia working with India to counter emerging global security challenges, including cybersecurity, maritime security, etc?

Ambassador Green: So, we've had for some time a cyber dialogue between Australia and India. We cooperate very closely in how each of us experiences cyber attacks and how we respond to them. I think we could do even more on that in the future, but already our agencies are very closely hooked up and our ambassador for cyber and tech affairs made a very powerful visit here earlier this year. On counter-terrorism, Australia and India stand together against terrorism in all its forms, in all of the relevant regional and international bodies to make sure that scourge is lessened to the greatest degree, we all have to remain vigilant. And then there's other fields on which cooperation is very important, so counter people smuggling, counter trafficking, counter narcotics. These are important fields where there is day-to-day collaboration going on between Australian agencies and Indian agencies, which is very important to us.

IANS: How can both nations collaborate on renewable energy technology like green hydrogen and solar power?

Ambassador Green: There's a lot of ways, as I said before, our principal effort in this at the moment is to ensure that India is best placed to develop Prime Minister Modi's ambition of 10 million solar rooftops and we are helping train the workforce for that. But, Australia is a country that has a lot of expertise in these fields. I think you may know that all of the modern technology for solar rooftops has the PERC technology in it, which was pioneered in the University of New South Wales in my hometown Sydney and we have as many international patents in the field of renewable energy as, for instance, a global tech major like Germany has. So, we want to bring some of the best of that tech to India.

/IANS