Prominent Chinese community leader, Dr Anthony “Tony” Pun died last night in Sydney, aged 77. In 1989 he came to public prominence when he lobbied then prime minister Bob Hawke to allow Chinese students to remain in Australia, in the wake of the crackdown on Chinese student protests that led to the Tiananmen Square incident. Continue reading »
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The Australian Government has announced a four-decades long deal to acquire American and British nuclear-powered submarines, at an indicative cost of $268 billion to $368 billion. This is an extraordinary timeframe and an extraordinary cost. The assumptions on which the deal has been constructed are ill-defined, and many of the assertions made to justify the Continue reading »
Like the occasional failure of a president to pronounce the name of our prime minister, US President Joe Biden cancelling his attendance at the QUAD is a reminder that America needs to balance bilateral relationships with 192 nation states and that up to 20 flatter themselves that their relationship is a special one. One time Continue reading »
Speaking at the American Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, deputy prime minister and defence minister Richard Marles opened with an anecdote praising a former PricewaterhouseCoopers partner. It was an interesting choice given the tax leaks scandal engulfing PwC, which is making headlines globally, and last week forced the resignation of its Australian CEO. But Marles was amongst Continue reading »
Interrogating the public record provides a fundamental challenge to the integrity of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR). It comes in the form of a reality which few wish to acknowledge: the captive Australian strategic imagination – a phenomenon of which Peter Dean, Head of the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney and Continue reading »
We are permitting ourselves no character of our own under the architecture of the Alliance. It means we’ve accepted the status of a kind of client state, or American territory. I won’t say the 51st state. It means we’ve got even less independence than a US governor would have, former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr Continue reading »
Bipartisan secrecy and Defence’s poor record with Indigenous groups at Woomera are red flags for consultations over an AUKUS nuclear waste dump. Human rights experts say government must establish an Indigenous veto right. Part one of a two-part series The federal government had no public mandate for any of the AUKUS decisions: no mandate to Continue reading »
Or will it fiddle around the edges like the Rudd/Gillard Governments? After seven years of struggle against the AMA and others ,Gough Whitlam and Bill Hayden launched Medibank/Medicare in 1975. Bob Hawke and Neal Blewett then put Medicare back in place after Fraser tried to destroy it. Despite a lot of good intentions and bold Continue reading »
The lethargy in lifting the age of criminal responsibility in Australia from 10 to 14 is scandalous given the numbers of vulnerable children caught up in the brutality of the criminal justice system daily. It’s called SCAGS, the Standing Committee of Attorney-Generals. For many years now the Commonwealth, state and territory first law officers and Continue reading »
Australia, and my Party too, must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and ‘telling truth to power’. Our blind adoption of irrational policies, supine and unquestioning acquiescence to anything the United States proposes must end. Our species, facing an existential threat to civilisation from climate change, Continue reading »