Australia

Ever since John Howard was unseated in the 2007 election and Australia launched itself into its decade-long cycle of political leadership instability, us foreign-policy types have wondered what damage it must all be doing to Australia’s reputation abroad. For the BBC’s Nick Bryant, a regular

Malcolm Turnbull jets off to Washington this week for talks with Donald Trump as both men are engulfed in distracting scandals. For Trump, chaos is constant, while for Turnbull, a brief moment of optimism at the end of last year about his political fortunes changing for the better has

The second-hand furniture business in Canberra must be booming. The last few days of Australian news has been dominated by the extraordinary story of how the ABC got hold of a trove of secret documents – dumped, apparently in ignorance, inside a locked filing cabinet at an ex-government

Represented by Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Frances Adamson, Australia was one of 20 countries that participated in a conference last week on coordinating international approaches to North Korea. Co-hosted by Canada and the US, and held in Vancouver, the conference had

Sometimes your closest friends, rather than your rivals, cause the biggest headaches. The blunt language contained in the 2018 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) is likely to complicate Australia’s strategy of balancing its security relationship with the US with its economic relationship with

Making a judgement in the present about events in the past is fraught with difficulties. It is natural and often right to view past events with the moral and legal perspectives of the present. However, it is very risky to impute motivation to actors in the past as if they were informed by facts or

When the Convention on the Law of the Sea allowed countries to establish exclusive economic zones, coastal nations claimed 90% of the world’s fisheries. This carried enormous significance, transferring fisheries property rights from the open access international commons to exclusive national

Australia’s complicated relationship with China is in the throes of a long overdue reset. A stream of reports about Chinese Communist Party influence in Australian politics and civil society have led Australians to take a second look at the country's largest trading partner.

In place of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's ambiguous commitment to support US military action against North Korea, Hugh White wants a clear statement ruling out Australia's participation in a 'pre-emptive' attack. But in turn there are two points of ambiguity in White's argument that may get in

Australia’s ties with Japan constitute one of the world’s most well-rounded bilateral relationships. The past decade alone has witnessed the achievement of several major milestones. Of particular significance has been the landmark Joint Defence and Security Cooperation (JDSC) agreement in 2007

This is Episode Two of Canberra Conversations, an occasional podcast series on The Interpreter where I talk with some of the big names from the foreign policy and national security worlds in Australia's capital. In Episode One, I spoke with Mike Pezzullo, Secretary of the Department of Immigration

Acts of violent extremism, such as the attacks in Barcelona earlier this month, are becoming a routine feature of the global security landscape. Such threats require little in the way of military infrastructure but are instead reliant upon a social capacity to fatally persuade individuals – often

Tensions have temporarily abated on the Korean Peninsula, following the latest blustery exchanges between Washington and Pyongyang. In typically mercurial fashion, after threatening 'fire and fury', President Donald Trump has now praised Kim Jong-un’s 'decision' not to launch missiles at Guam as '

By putting the creation of an Australian republic back onto the political agenda, Labor leader Bill Shorten has once more brought to the fore the connection between the nation’s constitutional status, its identity, and its place in the world. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of Shorten’s

Australia's future, and our future prosperity, are inevitably in Asia.   Julia Gillard pointed to this in 2012 when she launched the ‘Australia in the Asian Century’ White Paper, saying 'whatever else this century brings, it will bring Asia's return to global leadership, Asia’s rise.

Recent posts in The Interpreter (by Iain Henry, Euan Graham and James Goldrick) have commented on the presence of a Chinese intelligence-gathering ship off the Queensland Coast during Exercise Talisman Sabre. All these posts are broadly correct – the incident suggested Chinese hypocrisy with its

While responses to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s announcement on 18 July about the creation in 2018 of a Home Affairs Ministry ranged widely, the fact is that the decision has been made. But the announcement was short on detail and unclear in some areas, and the challenge now is to understand

Last week the Indian warships INS Kamorta, INS Shivalik and INS Jyoti arrived in Western Australia’s port city of Fremantle to participate in a bilateral exercise. The military drills came close on the heels of a controversial decision by New Delhi to reject Canberra’s request for observer

China’s push for the new normal has seen its local governments convert to public-private partnerships (PPPs), long-term contracts between a private party and government to provide a public asset or service. More than 12,000 such projects worth around US$2 trillion have kicked off since public

Last week in an exchange with Allan Gyngell, I argued that one of the problems facing Australian foreign policy in the future is the long-term decline of our two major political parties, whose memberships and share of the primary vote continue to shrink: 'much of the intellectual ballast for the

The Australia-US Ministerial Consultation (AUSMIN) on Monday was noteworthy for how normal it was. The meeting stood in stark contrast to the recent NATO Summit, where President Trump managed to raise more questions about the American commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance than he answered. In

On the airwaves this week, Australia’s Immigration Minister Peter Dutton continues to describe asylum seekers who are yet to submit their protection applications as 'fake refugees'. The Minister’s comments ignore the fact that government policy actually prevented these 7500 people from applying

Given the general gloom that seems to dominate contemporary Australian perceptions about Papua New Guinea’s ability to govern itself, it is refreshing to learn how mournfully doubtful successive Australian Cabinets in the late 1960s through to PNG’s independence in 1975 were about our former