Beijing's tactic of using trade as a political stick against Australia will not impress the rest of the world. Originally published in the Australian Financial Review
Twenty-four crew members of the Al Messilah, a livestock carrier under Kuwaiti flag, tested positive last week for Covid-19 at Fremantle Port in Western Australia. They are among the few cases where maritime crews have tested positive.
Despite assumptions that ships are an especially
Homeward bound
While Australia’s embrace of economic sovereignty has so far involved more rhetoric than real financial resources, cash incentives for reshoring manufacturing are gathering pace in other countries.
Last week’s €100 billion (A$162 billion) economic stimulus program from French
Albert Einstein once said that “in the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity”. For an open trading nation like Australia, the pandemic is an unparalleled crisis. The nation is facing its worst downturn since the Great Depression, along with recessions in key trading partners, severe
With sanctions already in place against beef and barley, Beijing’s ‘anti-dumping’ investigation is designed to punish Canberra over political disputes. Originally published in The Guardian
Multilateralism lives
With European leaders having just spent five days in close-contact negotiations in Brussels and now Australia’s first offshore ministerial visit for almost five months to Washington, a post-Covid diplomatic agenda is tentatively taking shape.
Just what Covid 19 might
Australia and the UK kicked off free trade agreement negotiations on 17 June to speeches and video presentations so triumphant as to border on self-parody. Yet for all the pageantry and scorn, a trade deal between Australia and the UK is fundamentally a commonsense policy that warrants neither
China’s barley tariffs have thrust the challenges of trade into the headlines with a prominence rarely seen in the popular Australian media. Although a crucial basis of national prosperity, the “trade” side of Australia’s international engagement has seemingly always had a lower profile than
Clayton Christensen’s 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma provides a series of compelling examples of companies ignoring or dismissing the disruptive potential of immature technologies until it’s too late, only for their upstart competitors to consign them to the dustbin of
Empty bench
It has been one of the most forecast developments in geo-economics, but the World Trade Organisation is about to finally suffer the crippling blow of its appeals process coming to a halt. On 11 December, the trade court will no longer have enough judges to issue the binding rulings that
Ninety per cent free
Australia’s election campaign might have been largely devoid of international affairs debate, but the Liberal Party did release a low-key trade policy which provides some insights into where the new government will take what it calls commercial diplomacy.
It is worth
Drought is an unavoidable hazard of farming in Australia. As the economic pressure mounts from the current drought in northern New South Wales and Queensland, there is increasing stress on farmers in the region, including in the dairy industry.
The federal government has stepped in with
With the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) now signed and awaiting ratification by the member states, the issue of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is again being debated. The high-profile opinion-catalysing group GetUp is encouraging 
Australia has formally lodged a complaint against restrictions some Canadian provinces have placed on the sale of imported wine in grocery stores, in what has been described, somewhat dramatically, as a 'wine war'.
Australia's action was described in the Ottawa Sun under the headline&
This is the second in a three-part series on the future of world trade from a global (part 1), Asia Pacific (part 2) and Australian (part 3) perspective.
The toughest message free marketeers have to get across is that encouraging others to open markets is not as important ensuring our economy is
The stability of Australia’s commercial relationship with Japan conceals some significant developments.
Japan, one of our most dependable customers, was our top export market for many decades and today remains second only to China. The mutual trust anchoring our trading relationship has, in turn
Buying friends
The debate over Australia’s most valuable economic partners hit fever pitch this month with new arguments over old measuring sticks for an increasingly contested aspect of international relations.
There is no absolute way of resolving this debate which involves value judgements
While there are natural cultural and institutional ties between Australia and the United Kingdom, it would be folly to choose the UK over the European Union; Australia’s trade with both the Asia-Pacific and the European Union must take priority over any favours to colonial history.
As the United
This issue of the G20 Monitor provides a guide to the policies that G20 members will have to tackle to achieve the G20’s 2 per cent growth target, drawing on the recommendations of the IMF, OECD and a number of international think tanks
In this Lowy Institute Analysis, G20 Studies Centre Director Mike Callaghan examines what outcomes from the Brisbane G20 Summit in November would help reinvigorate the forum and render this year's Summit a success