Australia in the World

At first glance, the 2021 Lowy Institute Poll, released today, tells a positive story about how Australians view a post-Donald Trump America: trust in the United States to behave responsibly in the world has rebounded to 61% (an increase of 10 points from last year), and nearly 70% of Australians

Australians generally hold a healthy self-image of the nation’s place on the global stage. The 2021 Lowy Institute Poll, released today, reveals that view to be sustained. In fact, it’s stronger than ever. The results speak largely to what many Australians see as competence in the face of

When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Pacific Island leaders about the dangers of “economic coercion” and “retribution” in an address on 2 June, he echoed a familiar view. By virtue of their “smallness” and “remoteness” Pacific Island states are presumed to be vulnerable

Worker vs worker vs student Almost five million Kiwis have always been at least cousins. And Scott Morrison’s distinctive contribution to regional security has been his embrace of about 10 million other islanders as “our Pacific family”. But in a week of rhetoric about international

Susannah Patton and Ashley Townshend argued in The Interpreter last week that the Morrison government should steer the Biden administration away from a coalition of world democracies since that would narrow Australian and American influence in the Indo-Pacific. An inflexible insistence that

Departure call While Australian exporters were shocked by the pace and extent of China’s trade sanctions last year, it now appears that investors were more quietly making their own exit. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) annual country data released last month shows that Australian

Australians are no strangers to the “climate wars”. For more than a decade, the politics of responding to global warming has felled prime ministers amid policy failures and repeals, leaving the country with a comparatively weak climate pledge. Destructive politics have overflowed into the lives

A recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald found that Australian media outlets quote the Global Times more often than they quote either China’s President Xi Jinping or members of the Chinese embassy in Canberra. This diet from a daily tabloid – viewed in the media industry as a source of

Scott Morrison’s odd choice of words about Taiwan won’t shift the consensus that his government remains wedded to unaccommodating positions on China. Only days after the Prime Minister was defending his surprise formula on cross-Strait relations, Canberra China’s debate was back in more

In late 2019, I published a short book titled Our Very Own Brexit, which argued that Australia might one day break from Asia as Britain had broken from Europe. The trigger I envisioned for such a break would be a debate about population, with one of our major parties defecting from the long-standing

The “DarkSide” ransomware cyber-attack on the US-based gasoline facility Colonial Pipeline, which has disrupted East Coast fuel supplies and invoked emergency legislation, has once again highlighted the vulnerability of a nation’s critical infrastructure to malicious cyber activity. In

In Australia’s budget last year, delayed until October responding to the unprecedented global health and economic crisis brought on by Covid-19, the Coalition government increased spending on foreign aid from $4 billion to $4.417 billion for the financial year 2020–21. The release this week of

The experience of crossing national borders has always been defined by inequality. A hierarchy of mobility determined those who were free and facilitated to move and those who faced many hurdles and restrictions to prevent them leaving home. But Covid-19 has challenged this mobility hierarchy.

Now that the Morrison government has cancelled Victoria’s Belt and Road agreement with China, Australia is bracing for retaliation from Beijing, probably by way of further trade sanctions. When that retaliation arrives, what should Australia do about it? There’s an old saying that “living

The Australian public are rightly proud of their efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost all Australians – 95% – believe Australia has handled the pandemic well, according to new Lowy Institute polling released today. This is for good reason. Despite the slow vaccine rollout, Australia

The recent floods in Timor-Leste have now caused 45 deaths and some 10,000 people to be displaced, including 7000 in the capital, with widespread damage to roads and bridges, and around 4500 dwellings destroyed. The government has called for international assistance, as a number of local non-

Next month brings the inauspicious one-year anniversary of China ramping up a campaign of trade punishment against Australia. Wine, barley, beef, lobster and coal have all been targeted. And there’s no end in sight.    Weary Australian government ministers could be forgiven for taking

Australia and Vietnam officially became strategic partners in 2018, promising to expand cooperation across multiple domains. Yet economic ties have grown slowly from a relatively low starting point, while defence relations are mostly restricted to training and high-level dialogues. Education and