Australia
Albanese’s foreign policy speech: “Boring” sounds just right
Call it the Goldilocks test. Too hot, and you can end up with a “negative globalism” moment. That was the awkward phrase adopted by former prime minister Scott Morrison in his…
The great offshore decommissioning
Battered by sea and wind, and eventually destroyed by economics, much of Australia’s offshore oil and gas structures are coming down. The latest estimates from the Centre of…
Australia–PNG security agreement: A revamp for Pacific partnerships
The leaders of Australia and Papua New Guinea put pen to paper on a bilateral security agreement this month. Known formally as the Agreement between the Government of Australia…
Decoding good intelligence
For an enterprise funded by the state, the public knows surprisingly little about intelligence activities. This goes far beyond the necessary secrecy of the work involved – but…
Shifting Quad relief operations from theory to practice
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes to emphasise the “practical dimension” of the Quad grouping – working together in response to disasters, not only the four members, but…
Australia needs an open-source intelligence agency
Because people have been spying for most of history, it’s easy to forget that our intelligence bureaucracy was developed primarily to fight the Cold War. After the Cold War the…
The Beijing blowback should Australia get closer to Taiwan
Should Australia adopt a more assertive and, by definition, riskier policy on Taiwan?
Benjamin Herscovitch and Mark Harrison, of the Australian National University and the…
Indonesia ratifies nuclear weapons ban treaty. Australia should too.
Indonesia’s parliament last month agreed to ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This is an important political development, and it…
“Egregious stupidity”: The story of when Australia split with Kissinger over South Asia
Australian appraisals of Henry Kissinger and his statecraft have quickly recalled how his secret visit to Beijing in July 1971 embarrassed the government of Billy McMahon in…
How to stop any repeat of the Australia-China sonar incident
Soviet warships regularly sparred with Western navies during the Cold War years, conducting close-in ship-to-ship manoeuvres and pointing lasers against their foreign opponents at…