CANBERRA: Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said on Monday she believes that long-standing relations between Thailand and Australia over the past 60 years would lead to further cooperation and development of peace and prosperity in the region, Thai News Agency (TNA) reported.
Speaking at a luncheon hosted by her Australian counterpart Julia Gillard at the Grand Hall inside the Australian Parliament building in Canberra, Yingluck, who is paying a four-day official visit to Australia from May 26-29, insisted that the established diplomatic relations between Australia and Thailand over the past six decades have now developed into warm bilateral friendship.
Yingluck acknowledged that the launch of the Thailand-Australia Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) in early 2005 has also led to greater bilateral cooperation in not only the fields of trade and investment, but also in the food, energy, tourism and other sectors.
The visiting Thai premier pointed out that being both democratic countries, Australia and Thailand have joined hands and worked together in several challenging regional and global issues, including those against transnational crime and on disaster preventions and mitigations, and that, regarding military ties, Thai and Australian troops had also joined the UN-led peace keeping mission in Timor-Leste and had jointly combated pirates in the Gulf of Aden.
Moreover, the Thai prime minister noted, people-to-people relations between Australia and Thailand have also strengthened under the connectivity frameworks of both the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and East Asia, as Canberra has become Asean’s first dialogue partner since 1974 and was also the first country supporting the regional connectivity idea by helping fund the construction of the First Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River some two decades ago. –Bernama