New Zealand academic Robert Patman advocates back peddling on confrontation with China to focus on fighting Russia, but both promise disaster. Robert Patman, a luminary of the New Zealand foreign policy establishment, has won applause from a surprising array of political positions for his hostility to NZ becoming involved in AUKUS. These range from former Continue reading »
politics
Growing touchiness as scandals mount. Singapore appears to be escalating its campaign to control the political narrative in the face of a growing series of scandals by invoking its “Fake News” law, known by the acronym POFMA, against the East Asia Forum, an Australia-based academic website run by the Australia National University’s Crawford School of Continue reading »
In her recent address to the National Press Club, Jacinta Price resuscitated the seventy years old policy of assimilation constructed by Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck. What should be done about indigenous Australians has been an abiding question for governments for generations. Echoes of past debates can be heard among the many views in contention Continue reading »
None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated by a hurricane-fuelled firestorm, a Greek island devastated by three years of rainfall in a single day, a Libyan town Continue reading »
China wants to expand its sphere of influence; the West, thankfully, is devoid of such base instincts. We can ignore the US’ vastly greater military budget, its 800 overseas military bases compared to China’s one, its mammoth track record of overseas interventions, and its military encirclement of China with Australia’s aid; China is the obvious Continue reading »
After more than six months of Parliamentary wrangling, the ALP’s flagship housing future fund bill finally cleared the Senate last week. For Australia’s neglected social housing sector, this presages a welcome revival of federally-supported capital investment, absent for most of the past quarter century. But, in a longer-term perspective, the resulting program will be significant Continue reading »
The rehabilitation of the federal public service is a slow waltz – one step forward, one sideways and a couple backwards. To stretch the metaphors and with apologies to Don Gibson’s fine 1961 hit song, while the administrative ship of state is adrift in a sea of heartbreak, its principal stewards seem half asleep at Continue reading »
This is a PLEA to all sensible women (and men) to vote Yes in the referendum because the damages of a No win will move us backward, not forward. We will still need ways of remedying the serious mess of inequities initiated in 1788. The failure of Yes will show the lack of sufficient trust Continue reading »
Indonesia and Australia have more to gain from energy transition – and more to lose from inaction – than any two countries in the world. But the Indonesian government must navigate significant policy challenges to attract the capital it needs for a swift, just and orderly transition. When Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited Australia recently Continue reading »
Australia, with fewer secrets to hide, is more compulsively secretive than the US, China or NATO. General Angus Campbell is concerned about “truth decay” and artificial intelligence, worried that eventually citizens of this country will be unable to sift fact from fiction. Countries such as Russia were using disinformation as a weapon of statecraft in America Continue reading »