A lot of opportunities have been missed to engage more closely with Indonesia over the last few decades, a period when Australian government enthusiasm and funding for engagement with Indonesia declined significantly. Correcting that is getting harder as time goes on and Indonesia grows in economic and political influence. The recent three-day visit to Australia Continue reading »
International Relations
The North Atlantic military alliance has no business in the continent and it should just stop going on about the so-called China threat. As Nato and its boss, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, keep banging on about “the China threat”, you really have to wonder what the real game plan is. A joint communique by Nato’s Continue reading »
“Of all of these four objectives that I call sustainable development. 1. Material Sufficiency; 2. Social Justice; 3. Environmental sustainability; and 4. Peace; we’re off track on all of them” – Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. “Nothing about the international economy guarantees the end of poverty or social justice. There’s nothing in the global economic system that Continue reading »
Its mid-summer in Rome and last week there was a heat wave with a top temperature of 38° Celsius. Hot days in Rome are stifling, with the heat compounded by the over-whelming influx of tourists. Like most Italian institutions, the Vatican normally closes down in summer, with previous popes retiring to Castel Gandolfo on Lake Continue reading »
I have yet to meet an Australian voter willing to go to war over Taiwan. Further, I haven’t heard of any Australian military leader with a clear idea of Australia’s role in a showdown between China and the US. Earlier this year, NASA’s survey satellite discovered an Earth-sized world within the habitable zone of a Continue reading »
“Over 56 years, Israel has governed the occupied Palestinian territory through stifling criminalisation of basic rights and mass incarcerations,” said Albanese in a report to the UN Human Rights Council on 10 July. GENEVA (10 July 2023) – Israel’s military occupation has morphed the entire occupied Palestinian territory into an open-air prison, where Palestinians are constantly confined, Continue reading »
Geo-politics is played on a world chessboard often by sad oldies in sober suits. To keep membership exclusive the polymath gamers use polysyllables and foreign tongues. Clearly not the place for a perky American doll. Yet Barbie has made it to the top without studying at the Sorbonne. She’s getting into the space of Xi Continue reading »
The Australian Defence Department’s new Frigates project is a jobs merry-go-round for former military officers, bureaucrats, and weapons makers. Integrity concerns with Australia’s $46 billion procurement from BAE Systems of nine warships were examined in Part One of Declassified Australia’s special ‘Sinking Billions’. The Defence contract management process was revealed to be flawed and suffering what the Australian Continue reading »
Defeat for the Voice referendum will reverberate internationally. Surviving suspicions about our racist past will be refreshed. It will come at the same time as our renewed embrace of our ‘forever friends’ in Britain and the United States and our growing enthusiasm for closer ties with NATO. Race is constantly referred to by both sides Continue reading »
When will Australians realise, as Paul Keating has been unerringly consistent in arguing, that they are part of the cosmopolitanism and complexity of Asia, and not a Western imagined community presided over by a fast declining America? During the maligned years of the Morrison-Turnbull-Abbott governments, Australia’s international reputation fell on a number of significant measures Continue reading »