The former diplomatic mandarins of Oz think Australia is so committed to the US alliance it has mislaid its primary focus on Asia. A leading light of the ex-mandarins, John McCarthy, says Asia sees Australia …
Debate: "Australia and its Region"
Recently, the US and Japan released the Interim Report on the Revision of the Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation (PDF). The revision’s the first since 1997 and occurs in the context of Asia-Pacific power shifts. …
Late last year, as the bilateral relationship between Australia and Indonesia struggled with the revelations of the spying scandal, Colin Brown, an adjunct professor at the Griffith Asia Institute, described the history of the relationship …
Australian Defence white papers have long identified the strategic import of ‘a secure South Pacific and Timor-Leste’. As renowned strategic thinker T.B. Millar once reflected, Papua New Guinea is an ‘an exposed and vulnerable front …
The first thing that Joko Widodo will think about when he wakes up today, the day of his inauguration as president, won’t be Indonesia’s relationship with Australia. Nor, for that matter, with the other countries …
On Monday 20 October Joko Widodo (Jokowi) will be inaugurated as Indonesia’s seventh president. Australia–Indonesia relations will shift to a new and more mature plane due to differences in character between Jokowi and his predecessor, …
In an ASPI Special Report launched today, we explore options for future police engagement between Australia and Papua New Guinea. In July 2013, during negotiations to reopen the Manus Island detention centre, PNG Prime Minister …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZ_ipV9lUU Australia has sent forth many outstanding journalists to spend their careers reporting on Asia. Sean Dorney stands with those correspondents but, uniquely, he devoted his life to covering Papua New Guinea and the South …
Last week, Graeme Dobell wrote that ‘Australia has had no influence on the course of events since Suharto fell’. Not so. Although the decision to hold a referendum in East Timor in 1999 was made …
When Australia thinks strategy, it quickly comes to Indonesia. So it was when the Howard Government was mulling the 2000 Defence White Paper. The National Security Committee of Cabinet was grilling the defenceniks: ‘If Indonesia …
New Caledonia, our French neighbour, sits just off the Queensland coast, but well off our strategic radar screen. Our Defence White Paper 2013 doesn’t mention it, nor even France’s role in the South Pacific. However, France’s 2013 …
Indonesia can direct Australia’s regional dreams or dominate its nightmares. Just as Papua New Guinea shapes the way Australia thinks about the South Pacific, Indonesia frames Australia’s view of Southeast Asia. In those key regional …