It is now the case that Australia’s alliance with the United States is best described as the Great Harmonisation. On all principal matters of strategic interest – especially in all fundamental aspects of China as the “pacing threat” – the overwhelming impression is that, though Washington and Canberra are spatially separated, they nevertheless speak and Continue reading »
AUKUS
Cartoonist Geoff Pryor tees off for the weekend on how we were persuaded to allow Northern Australia to become a US military colony. Continue reading »
How ironic that mainstream newspapers and conservative commentators should lambast former prime minister Paul Keating for living in the past when he denounced the AUKUS agreement and the Labor government’s fulsome support of it. It was, of course, the AUKUS agreement itself, entered into by Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden in 2022, that Continue reading »
Prior to his most recent overseas trip to Jakarta, Manila, and New Delhi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been abroad a dozen times. Not bad for a government that’s been in office for just on eighteen months. The next few months will see him flying off again for half a dozen more summits, head to head meetings Continue reading »
Marise Payne’s tenure as Australia’s Foreign Minister was rightly marked with criticism. Australia’s international and strategic interests went backwards during her time. But was she really Australia’s worst Foreign Minister as some commentators assert? It’s important to consider the root cause of the damage done to Australia’s national interests: the belligerent interference and harm done Continue reading »
A good way to scare people is to suggest your chief security body has written something so frightening that you can’t possibly let anyone read anything about it. Or maybe your top spooks have just produced something that would embarrass the government greatly, and therefore it really must stay hidden. It’s more likely to be Continue reading »
Australia has no business playing the victim when the lines between strategy and economic interests have become increasingly blurred. Beijing should treat with caution renewed efforts to get relations back on track, and avoid rewarding Canberra for its coercive behaviour. Representatives from the Australian government embarked on a trip to Beijing last week, signalling the Continue reading »
I wonder how many Australians know where the Ayungin Shoal/Second Thomas/Ren’ai Jiao is? Do they know that their Navy has been deployed to this atoll, ostensibly to defend their “national interest”! Do Australians know that the sovereignty of the Philippine occupied shoal (since 1998), is being disputed by China, Vietnam, and Taiwan? Do they know Continue reading »
Perhaps AUKUS should be renamed MAUKUS – the Morrison, Albanese, United Kingdom and United States agreement – to clearly identify those responsible. Indeed, it is surprising that neither Defence Minister Richard Marles nor Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy invited Australian Labor Party National Conference delegates to support a motion of appreciation to former Prime Minister Continue reading »
In matters of defence and national security strategy Australia has entered a period of great transformations. The AUKUS submarine project is the proximate cause: a vanity project born of fantasies so dense that, strategically speaking, it has created gravitational waves of a magnitude that warps everything it encounters. More precisely, it warps in ways that Continue reading »