Last week’s surprise AUKUS announcement by the United States, Britain and Australia has created a frenzy of focus on nuclear-powered submarines, but the bigger picture is getting lost in a sea of naval analysis. The …
Articles by: "Fergus Hanson"
In part 1 of this series, we talked about Australia’s rapidly changing strategic environment. In this follow-up, we focus on ways that Australia’s foreign policy funding models should adapt to accommodate to this new environment. …
Australia’s strategic environment has changed dramatically over the past decade. The Indo-Pacific is an increasingly complex place to call home and we must be able to more rapidly reshuffle our limited foreign policy resources towards …
As we reach the pointy end of the Australian government’s negotiation on the mandatory news media bargaining code, it’s worth thinking through some of the consequences if the code becomes law. The most dramatic would …
Norwegian salmon, South Korean celebrities, Canadian pork and, most recently, Australian wine—the Chinese Communist Party’s coercive diplomacy over the past few years has spanned commodities and continents. However, countries’ responses have remained largely short-sighted and …
In a piece titled ‘The think-tank behind Australia’s changing view of China’, the Australian Financial Review recently gave prominence to a few critics of ASPI’s China research. But instead of engaging with the research and …
Back in 2016, Australia launched a new national cybersecurity strategy.* The strategy covers a four-year period to 2020, and given the changes in the security environment, an update is now clearly warranted. To that end, …
Cyber-enabled election interference has already changed the course of history. Whether or not the Russian interference campaign during the US 2016 federal election was enough to swing the result, the discovery and investigation of the …
Yesterday the government and opposition came to an agreement to pass the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 just before parliament rises. The bill rocketed towards the top of the political agenda when the government demanded …
During the initial wave of digital-transformation efforts, Australia developed an international reputation as an early leader. That peaked in around 1999. While the different tiers of government (local, state and federal) and individual agencies have …
Unless you’re an avid reader of federal budget statements, you probably missed the $92.4 million allocation in the 2018–19 Budget to build a digital identity scheme known as GovPass—the second one that taxpayers will now …
In 2015 then-US President Barack Obama metaphorically arm-wrestled Chinese President Xi Jinping into agreeing to stop engaging in commercial cyber espionage. Since then, China has made a similar pact with G20 members and made bilateral …