Global Issues
Preparing Australia to respond to disasters – at home and abroad
The Covid pandemic relentlessly rolls on but prescribed burns have now also begun across Australia as the next bushfire season rapidly approaches. Such actions highlight that…
Bad news for Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
The release of recent research from the Netherlands adds an additional insight into what is happening in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, the country’s all-important food producing region…
The connectivity trade-off from social media misinformation
Rumours and falsehoods on social media spread faster than the truth. A recent study conducted in the United States found evidence that polarising political content (such as left…
Bringing home Australian children trapped in Syrian camps
The Covid-19 pandemic has dominated global and local news to such an extent for the last 18 months that there remains room for little else. But the aftermath of military campaigns…
Commentary
Xi Jinping reels in his tech titans
Private enterprise created China’s vaunted digital economy. But Big Brother is always in charge. Originally published in the Australian Financial Review.
Postcard from Tokyo 2020+1
My university campus sits amid several Olympic venues and the international media centre, down by the ports on Tokyo Bay. From my tenth floor office, I can observe the…
Commentary
Australia buying Digicel hits two birds with one stone
On top of staving off a China telco monopoly, underwriting the purchase would show the government is putting big money on the table to get ‘blue chip’ companies to invest in the…
Can Biden’s Build Back Better World compete with the Belt and Road?
The announcement of the Build Back Better World (BW3) infrastructure and investment plan following the G7 summit last month has been greeted with scepticism by some who…
Press freedom more important than ever in the Asia–Pacific
The current Covid-19 pandemic has had an alarming impact on press freedom. Over the past 18 months, governments across the Asia–Pacific have – knowingly or not – used the health…
Economic diplomacy: Little Australia spends slowly in the Pacific
Baby BRIs
It is now almost three years since Prime Minister Scott Morrison muscled up to China’s infrastructure building Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with $3 billion in varied…