Global Issues

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 in the broader Middle East has continued to generate headlines. Most recently it was the debate over Canberra’s

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 question its ability to compete with China’s financial outlays for its much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). What

The last 18 months have been trying times for the Group of 20 (G20). The Covid world continues to challenge the effectiveness of multilateralism – the practicalities as well as the policy issues. While the government-to-government track of the G20 appears held together by a hybrid of in-person and

Since mid-May, Indonesia has faced a massive surge in Covid-19 infections with the number of reported positive daily cases increasing fivefold. As of the most recent update from the World Health Organisation, Indonesia has recorded more than 2.5 million positive cases since the pandemic began and

With the advance of the Taliban in parts of Afghanistan and the withdrawal of coalition forces, the question of how to help Afghans who worked intimately with Australian forces has become a significant media and political issue. Former Prime Minister John Howard, who dispatched Australian troops to

A worsening third wave of Covid-19 is a cruel new blow in Myanmar, still reeling from the human costs of the coup on 1 February, and with a military junta more focused on combatting dissent than combatting the virus. Thousands of new cases have arisen since late May, and the Delta, Alpha and Kappa

This week, Chinese multinational technology giant Tencent shut down hundreds of accounts on WeChat linked to LGBTQ groups. Suddenly millions of queer people in China were confronted by a blunt message on their favourite social media accounts: In response to related complaints, all content has been

On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping reiterated the longstanding Chinese goal of strengthening science and technology to help achieve national rejuvenation. China’s advances in areas such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and facial recognition have already

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab made a whirlwind trip last week to Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore – three key nations that figure prominently in the UK’s post-Brexit trade calculations. Raab boasted the Cambodia visit was the first to the country by a British foreign secretary in

Centres of power such as Beijing, Washington and Taipei have generated most of the headlines as the Taiwan challenge gets ever hotter. But, while these cities clearly have plenty of input into how events develop, it is a much less known centre of influence that may hold the key to the future of

It would have been so easy. In response to the G7 resolution “to achieve an overwhelmingly decarbonised power system in the 2030s” with focus on stopping investment in traditional coal power plants, the Australian PM could have simply said “that’s right, same here, and by the way we will cut

For years, Indonesia has been plagued by so-called “elastic laws” – a set of bills that can see a person indicted for violating poorly defined provisions, such as defaming an individual or group, religious blasphemy, committing treason, or inciting public disorder. Activists have pointed out

In May, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to include an item about “the Responsibility to Protect” on the Assembly’s annual agenda. On one view, the resolution is not a big deal. There are more than 100 standing items on the annual agenda, on topics ranging from

Recent media reports suggest that different perspectives on maritime boundaries are creating tensions between Australia and Indonesia. An Indonesian border negotiator told The Australian Financial Review last month that talks between Australia and Indonesia on maritime boundaries had restarted in

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

Book Review: Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (Penguin, 2021) Perhaps the most original contribution of Fareed Zakaria’s new book Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World is his “general theory” of Covid-19. Zakaria looks back 20 years to the political

Thailand emerged from the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic as one of the best performing countries in the world in terms of minimising cases and deaths. But 2021 has been a different story. A surge in infections since the beginning of April has seen thousands of new cases each day and a spike

Fiji’s capital Suva has been in and out of Covid lockdowns over recent weeks, and my Netflix got a workout. I watched a TV show called “Cooked with Cannabis”. Admittedly there were a few baked hippies, but the cooking was good. Jokes aside, the show revealed the sophisticated and

Last year, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in launched a climate-change policy branded as a “Green New Deal” as part of a wider stimulus package for the country’s pandemic-afflicted economy. This sat alongside a commitment to achieve a net-zero carbon emissions target by the year 2050

International space law has again become a theatre of geopolitical competition. Unlike the bipolar space race of the Cold War era, a proliferating cast of countries and corporations are developing spacefaring capacity, testing the limits of existing law. China recently matched the United States in

The cyclone which hit Timor-Leste on 4 April was traumatising. We were awakened at 3 am by heavy rain and winds gusting at more than 125km/hour. Water began to flood into our house, and 15 minutes later we had to escape by swimming. The water reached almost two metres. Throughout, I had to keep