Australia
Economic diplomacy: Diversification is hard to do
Catching up
It is now 25 years since then World Bank senior vice-president and chief economist Joseph Stiglitz remarkably turned on his employer to set out a roadmap for …
France-Australia: Salving the wounds of AUKUS
If a week is a long time in politics, 18 months makes for a lifetime in diplomacy. That’s the time now elapsed since the “stab in the back” – words French Foreign Minister Jean…
Australia’s Myanmar sanctions: now for the real decisions
It took Australia two years after Myanmar’s coup to impose new sanctions. On 1 February, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced autonomous sanctions on the 16 members of the State…
Marles torpedoes French subs, but is yet to explain nuclear advantage
Of all the places to drop a bombshell about Australia’s quest for new submarines, could Defence Minister Richard Marles have picked a worse one than Paris? The question put to…
How will China’s punitive trade restrictions against Australia end?
Recent reports of an imminent meeting between Australia’s and China’s trade ministers have raised hopes of progress toward the removal of the trade restrictions that China imposed…
How an Australian freed an unfinished nation’s history
Book review: Indonesia out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship, by Max Lane (Penguin, 2023)
Australia’s relationships with Indonesia are usually…
Link start-ups ecosystems to build influence in Southeast Asia
In 2019, Indonesian President Joko Widodo surprised many when he appointed 35-year old Nadiem Makarim as Minister for Education and Culture. Makarim had risen to prominence as the…
Australia should have more public holidays – but make them civic and secular
The events that we choose to designate public holidays say a lot about who we are and what we believe in as Australians. So, as Osmond Chiu rightly argued last week in The…
Towards meaningful Quad cooperation on intelligence
The Quad has a lot on its plate. The informal grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the United States began modestly, but stepped up its ambition two years ago, with regular…
Undue suspicion of Chinese Australian scientists slows progress
With technological competition now at the centre of the geostrategic rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, scientific exchange and collaboration…