Former prime minister Bob Hawke said Australia's economic prosperity would increasingly depend upon Asia's growth.
He said China in particular has become an important trading partner and that the Asian region's demand for commodities helped Australia avoid a recession during the global financial crisis (GFC).
"I said in my first press conference as prime minister that the future of Australia will be determined more than anything else, in terms of external factors, by the extent to which Australia became enmeshed with Asia in general and with China in particular," Hawke said.
"What you have been seeing over the last 30-40 years is the movement of the centre of world economic gravity across from the mid-Atlantic to the mid-Pacific, moving steadily west. And Australia has benefited immeasurably from that change and it has strengthened economically by the changes."
He made the comments at the Financial Services Council's annual conference in Melbourne last week.
Hawke said the trade alliance he brokered between Australian iron ore suppliers and the Chinese steel industry in the 1980s has gone from strength to strength and is one of the factors that helped maintain Australia's economic growth during the GFC.
In the 2008/09 period, eight of Australia's top ten export destinations were in the Asia-Pacific, according to government data.
China has climbed from being Australia's fourth-largest trading partner in 1999 to the biggest in recent times, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics and UBS data.
Developing Asia - which includes China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia - is expected to be the world's fastest growing region in 2011 with forecast output growth of 8.5 per cent, the International Monetary Fund said in July.
