Indonesia’s religious affairs minister, Lukman Hamid Saifuddin, is a breath of fresh air. He’s a break from a long line of ineffectual predecessors who did nothing to defend minorities and showed extreme cowardice in facing …
Japan has appeared to surrender, and we are waiting this weekend to hear whether this will become effective. If so, this horrible war will be at an end, but many of its ill-effects will be …
Australia is offering India a renewed geostrategic embrace and an economic deal—notable efforts by Canberra to strengthen geostrategic convergence with India and to deepen geo-economic linkages. The bilateral effort with India feeds the regionalist understanding …
Yesterday marked 70 years since the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Newsweek has a photo series on the commemorations, and the BBC tells the story of one survivor through a short animation. Here …
For generations the Australian public has associated Gallipoli with a beach and a dawn landing. In recent years, books, documentaries and television series have repeated a story that leap-frogs over the campaign’s stereotypical events and …
Andrew Davies and Mark Thompson have pointed out problems with the Government’s recently announced $89 billion naval shipbuilding programme. In an earlier piece on naval shipbuilding, they thought the Government had ‘the tail wagging the …
As Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, approaches the end of his first year in office, some Indonesians are looking back nostalgically at his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Yudhoyono ruled Indonesia for ten …
It’s been 70 years since a nuclear bomb was detonated in anger, a remarkable achievement given that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both happened within one month of the Trinity test. Another 840 months …
With the Abbott government’s announcement of a new ship building program in Adelaide, there will be plenty of argument over the logic and strategic basis of the decision, on top of the ongoing domestic shipbuilding …
The Beat Organised criminals target Australia Post The Australian Federal Police are expected to charge a Melbourne criminal syndicate formerly contracted to Australia Post with fraud, conspiracy to influence a Commonwealth official and dealing with …
In a Strategic Insights paper released today, Creative tension: parliament and national security, we argue that enhancing parliament’s role in national security will reinforce executive accountability, expand public access to policy processes, improve the quality …
I recently spoke at the third ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) workshop on cybersecurity held in Beijing. In the following two posts I’ll look at the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure in the Asia–Pacific, and examine some …
As we await the release of Government’s Cyber Security Strategy, the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s first unclassified threat report has provided an indication of the challenges the Strategy is seeking to overcome. The high rate …
In my earlier post I argued that, notwithstanding the strong legal underpinning of the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement, it’s possible that Bougainville and Waigani may be on a collision course. What would such a collision …
The government’s announcement of an ‘$89 billion shipbuilding program’ today is bold on two fronts. First, in the implicit assumption that much of the price premiums paid on past and current projects and the poor …
Sea State The Philippine Government has voiced its interest in acquiring three more ex-Royal Australian Navy Balikpapan-class heavy landing craft (LCH). Retired in December 2012, the vessels have a military lift capacity of three medium …
The 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA) marked the formal end to the 1990s Bougainville conflict, even though a truce, and subsequently a ceasefire, had been in place since late 1997. Among other things, the BPA …
Schools are now on the frontline of countering violent extremism (CVE). Last week, the New South Wales government announced a state-wide audit of all prayer groups conducted in public schools following allegations of radical Islam …
Last week’s release of the first Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Threat Report provides some sobering statistics and interesting case studies on the cyber threats facing Australia. It outlines the problem well, but beyond the …
A few days after kicking Singapore out of the federation in 1965, Malaysia’s leader Tunku Abdul Rahman had a news conference to discuss the traumatic political divorce. The avuncular aristocrat was typically chirpy as he …