Kofi Annan deserves to be remembered as a near-exemplary United Nations secretary-general (SG). Great chief executives need a guiding vision for the exercise of authority, and all the more so when that authority is international civil …
Debate: "General"
Advocates of stronger and more effective Australian engagement in the South Pacific face a couple of entrenched structural challenges. First, the region is hardly critical to Australia’s economic future—the South Pacific accounts for a mere …
Though the British Labour Party’s anti-Semitism scandal has dominated headlines in the United Kingdom of late, there is a more profound debate with the same theme taking place in Germany. Most worryingly, the fundamental tenets …
Sea state The US has announced a plan to deploy a hospital ship to Colombia to assist with the Venezuelan refugee crisis. The schedule for the departure of the ship, most likely to be USNS …
Schloss Meseberg is a Baroque-style palace that serves as the official guest house of the German federal government. It sits in an idyllic location 70 kilometres north of the capital, and on Saturday Chancellor Angela …
One of the reasons countries support indigenous defence industries is to ensure their sovereign control over defence capabilities. The argument is that by having the ability to design, manufacture and sustain military equipment, a country …
The immediate future of the RAAF’s strike and air combat capability seems clear. We’re getting 72 F-35A joint strike fighters that will form the heart of the force into the 2040s and serve alongside up …
The Kremlin’s foreign policy increasingly seems to rest on the assumption that all countries are as corruptible as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was evident most recently in Russia’s alleged efforts to undermine an agreement between …
On 9 August in South Lebanon, a routine patrol of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was attacked by civilians. In the course of the incident, their vehicles were set on fire and …
While Heisenberg proclaims the uncertainty principle, a public service inquiry operates on the certainty principle. Not for government, Heisenberg’s quantum insight about the impossibility of simultaneously measuring position and momentum; nor the observer effect—that to …
The world Is the Caspian Sea a lake or a sea? For decades this question caused dispute and deadlock between the countries on its shores. On Sunday, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan signed an …
There’s been a lot of focus on the security arrangements for the My Health Record system. Most of the commentary has been about protecting the data, how secure the platform is for storing the data, …