Bob Carr
Bob Carr is a former Premier of New South Wales (1995–2005), a former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (2012–2013) and the former Director of the Australia–China Relations Institute, the University of Technology Sydney (2014–2019).
Bob Carr was the longest-serving premier of NSW and a federal Labor foreign minister.
Bob's recent articles
28 December 2024
Best of 2024: “I told you so”: No Aussie subs in 2030s, total reliance on the Yanks
The sweetest words in the English language: I told you so.
14 November 2024
Is AUKUS safe under Trump?
Former Labor Foreign Minister Bob Carr joins Steve Cannane to discuss: is the country's key strategic military agreement with the US under threat from a Trump presidency?
8 August 2024
Australia needs to hear its tone of voice in our conversations more than ever
Pearls & Irritations needs support at a critical time and when Australia needs to hear its tone of voice in our conversations more than ever.
20 April 2024
"Fragrant, methane-wrapped bullshit": NZ should steer clear of AUKUS
I don't want to appall the diplomats present by using a vulgarism, but Pillar two [of AUKUS] is fragrant methane-wrapped bullshit. Australia and New Zealand are beautifully placed to nurture and defend a different model of relationships between the prevailing power [the US] and the rising power [China]: A different approach from the one that says war is inevitable, says former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr.
20 March 2024
Dtente: Towards a balance of power between the USA and China
Former Foreign Ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans, other former Cabinet Ministers, former State Premiers, a Nobel Laureate, diplomats, writers, academics and human rights advocates are among 50 Australians supporting an appeal to establish dtente between the United States of America and the Peoples Republic of China.
15 March 2024
I told you so: No Aussie subs in 2030s, total reliance on the Yanks
The sweetest words in the English language: I told you so.
30 January 2024
We must do everything in our power to build a comprehensive new dtente between the US and China
We, and our fellow 50 Australian signatories, believe that it is time for the United States and China to enter into a comprehensive new dtente, formally pledging to treat each other as mutually respectful equals, to resolve differences peacefully and to work together to advance global and regional goods like nuclear arms control, the mitigation of global warming, counter-terrorism and cyber-regulation.
30 January 2024
Dtente: Towards a balance of power between the USA and China
Former Foreign Ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans, other former Cabinet Ministers, former State Premiers, a Nobel Laureate, diplomats, writers, academics and human rights advocates are among 50 Australians supporting an appeal to establish dtente between the United States of America and the Peoples Republic of China.
25 September 2023
AUKUS consensus is collapsing under weight of Labor blunders
When Anthony Albanese addressed his federal electoral council on July 6 he rebutted criticism of AUKUS by saying Labor governments always have to prove themselves on national security.
18 September 2023
Taking the high ground: let kindness have its day
I lost any reservations about The Voice after seeing a movie.
6 September 2023
The Palestinian catastrophe: Occupation, Illegality and Apartheid
It is time for us to use the words Occupation, Illegality and Apartheid. We are applying these words to an occupying power truculent and implacable in its determination its occupation will never end, committed to a creeping annexation to deliver it a permanent hold over Palestinian land and Palestinian people. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable that Australias oldest and largest political party would endorse Palestinian recognition. Thats now taken for granted as the very least we can do in the face of a cruel and continuing catastrophe.
21 August 2023
Australias biggest AUKUS risk? America, our dangerous ally
The biggest enemy of AUKUS is not the resistance of ALP branches and unions but its own over-engineered grandiosity, its naive ambition.
27 July 2023
What have you done for US lately?
If Albanese is such a buddy of Biden's, why is Assange still in jail? Especially after our titanic strategic favours.
14 July 2023
Taiwan solution is diplomacy rather than nuclear hell
I have yet to meet an Australian voter willing to go to war over Taiwan. Further, I havent heard of any Australian military leader with a clear idea of Australias role in a showdown between China and the US.
23 June 2023
Menzies told the US, ANZUS did not apply on Taiwan. Why not Albanese?
Call it Carrs law. Im pretty confident it withstands any testing. Its simple: find someone talking up war with China and, if they were around 20 years ago, you find they were a supporter of the Iraq invasion.
19 May 2023
Polarisation and dysfunction in Washington
I enjoyed seeing Susan Glasser in The New Yorker take precisely my view of the polarisation and dysfunction in Washington and how it must be seen as an influence on US behaviour.
18 May 2023
Australias real status as a submissive ally
Like the occasional failure of a president to pronounce the name of our prime minister, US President Joe Biden cancelling his attendance at the QUAD is a reminder that America needs to balance bilateral relationships with 192 nation states and that up to 20 flatter themselves that their relationship is a special one.
11 May 2023
AUKUS, Assange, and the seething pathologies of the American Security State
We are permitting ourselves no character of our own under the architecture of the Alliance. It means weve accepted the status of a kind of client state, or American territory. I wont say the 51st state. It means weve got even less independence than a US governor would have, former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr says in conversation with ABC LNL host Phillip Adams.
20 March 2023
Weve long said no to US. A yes now could be nuclear
Its Parliament House, Canberra, on a Sunday afternoon. There is a meeting of the national security committee of cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, about a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, where the US and China are in air and naval combat. Theres an inflection point when someone a minister or the PM uses the fatal locution: Well, weve got no alternative . . .
24 February 2023
The one hope for peace in the West Bank
Last Thursday, the Australian government condemned Israel for planting more settlements on the occupied West Bank: 10,000 extra units. Its a big step to criticise Israel because in Australia its organised friends are a powerful lobby. But this was a huge breach of international law. And, as Penny Wong pointed out, a deliberate blow to a two-state solution.
5 August 2022
Bob Carr - Keep the peace between China and the US: our goal
If there is conflict between the US and China this is how things might go- a crisis meeting of the Australian cabinet with a resigned air and desultory exchanges, until someone - defence minister or prime minister - says something like, Well, theres no alternative, is there?
18 July 2022
Australia can safely improve its relations with China. Heres how
In 2012, the then-prime minister of Vanuatu Sato Kilman, was passing through Sydney Airport. Without warning, the Australian Federal Police swooped and arrested his Australian secretary on charges of tax evasion. Kilman was furious a staffer had been kidnapped and, back in Port Vila, threatened to tear up the agreement under which Australia trained his police, and invite China to take over.
20 June 2022
If Albanese asks for Assanges freedom, Biden has every reason to agree: Bob Carr
Two years ago at my local ALP branch, I moved a motion urging the party to support dropping extradition proceedings against Julian Assange. Maroubra ALP is not inner city. It might be regarded as a bastion of the right. The motion was carried, near unanimously. After the debate, one member came up and said: I think Assange is probably a narcissistic bastard but hes ours.
5 June 2022
Is criticism of Israeli settlement policy anti-Semitic?Israeli nationalists insist it is
Calling out China for its persecution of Uighurs is not to be a Sinophobic racist. Calling out Myanmar for its crimes against Rohingya people is not to be anti-Buddhist. Calling out Saudi Arabia and Egypt for their murder and suppression of dissidents is not to be Islamophobic or anti-Arab. And calling out Israel for its sabotage of the two-state solution and creation of a de facto apartheid state is not to be anti-Semitic.
31 May 2022
The Israeli lobby and Labor
In 2021, Australian journalist John Lyons published Dateline Jerusalem: Journalisms Toughest Assignment. It examined the pro-Israel lobby in Australia which I have described as the most powerful foreign influence operation in our country. Lyons quoted Chris Mitchell, the long time editor of The Australian, saying that the Israel lobby became more right-wing after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.
23 May 2022
On back of urgency on climate, Australia is tipping centre-left
The American Civil War had more than one cause. But it would not have happened without slavery. Saturdays route of Scott Morrisons Liberals has several explanations but would not have happened without climate.
25 January 2022
I oppose Israel boycott, but laws against it are classic overreach
Anti-BDS laws would make Israel the only nation protected under Australian statute from this kind of criticism and penalise innocent Australians.
17 November 2021
The one word that will stop sleepwalking our way to war over Taiwan.
Are we sleepwalking our way to war? Australia should be reminding China and the US that it's vital to avoid conflict over Taiwan.
8 October 2021
Bob Carr: Israel lobby's overreach far exceeded any other diaspora community
For casting light on the savage lobbying the Australian media and politicians receive from the Israel lobby, John Lyons should be congratulated.
28 June 2021
Whitlam confirmed great man theory
If someone had said at the start of the year I would be going to China, Gough Whitlams aide Graham Freudenberg recalled, I would have said going to the moon would be more likely.
2 May 2021
Where are the grown-ups? The talk about China and war is dangerous
So whats the plan? asked an investor after I had spoken at the Lonsec Symposium about Australia-China relations. Days earlier, Defence Minister Peter Dutton talked war over the Taiwan Strait. His former department head said our warriors were ready to go fight.
21 January 2021
America's silo society has to face its racial demons
In past upheavals, Americans at least all shared the same news. Now there is an apartheid of the national spirit that is creating deeper divisions than ever...If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?
19 December 2020
World leaders deserve to know about Australia's abysmal climate change policy, so I wrote to them
Australias leaders are playing with climate policy, pitching a nationalist and populist message to their base.
1 November 2020
The US electoral system is a shambles. They could learn a lot from Australia. (The Guardian Oct 29, 2020)
Systemic voter suppression and rules still being set for an election within days this is American exceptionalism.
8 October 2020
There's an essential starting point for grasping the crisis engulfing US politics
In the 50s the head of CIA counterintelligence James Angleton said Russian stratagems were like a wilderness of mirrors. The same phrase captures the maze of the US constitutional and electoral system, a wilderness of mirrors that can warp, even falsify, the choice of voters on November 3.
13 September 2020
How Australia's climate policy fell victim to the conservatives (SMH Sep 11, 2020)
It took one lunch with George W. Bush in 2001 for John Howard to agree to dropping ratification of Kyoto, without a word to his ministers. We became the president's closest friend in resisting climate change.
3 September 2020
Joe Biden's bold climate policies would leave Australia behind (The Guardian Sep 2, 2020)
Australia may be sailing perilously close to being cast by Bidens team with other climate resisters Brazil and Saudi Arabia.
23 August 2020
Sinking billions of taxpayer dollars into gas would make Australia an international pariah (The Guardian, August 21 2020)
The Morrison governments post-Covid recovery commission has called for an astonishing level of support for a declining carbon fuel.
4 August 2020
Coalition toes party line between US and China (SMH, 3 August 2020)
Don't sell your soul for a pile of soybeans, warned US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a year ago, when Australian foreign affairs and defence ministers met their United States counterparts.
22 July 2020
We now know gas is far from the clean fuel it's claimed to be (SMH 16.7.20)
Australia's recovery will be driven by gas says the prime minister. A task force headed by Andrew Liveris- a business figure with career doused in carbon- recommends subsidies to ramp up the industry.
27 May 2020
BOB CARR. Hidden Reality of Australia-China Relations
The best reading on the state of Australia-China relations is in documents we cant see. That is, in the cables sent from Canberra to their capitals by ambassadors of Asian nations.
18 May 2020
BOB CARR. While the world looked the other way, corporate giants abandoned coal (SMH 15.5.20)
Can we deal with a pandemic and global warming at once both urgent, one an immediate hit, the other a decade-long burn? Well, yes, because even with front pages dominated by COVID-19 last month saw an astonishing concentration of decisions by international corporates to ditch carbon. And they slipped by, with the world looking the other way.
13 April 2020
BOB CARR supports Pearls and Irritations.
Pearls & Irritations is unique, indispensable, provocative and refreshing. It really does make a difference.
11 November 2019
BOB CARR. Erratic US Pacific policy is leaving Australia stranded (Australian Financial Review 8-11-19)
The Canberra hawks hope that our tough stance on China will encourage US resolve. But that underestimates the flightiness of Donald Trump.
31 October 2019
Vale Paul Francis Patrick Whelan
Bob Carr Tribute to Paul Whelan October 31, 2019. Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr paid tribute to his Police Minister Paul Whelan for his achievement in implementing the Wood Royal Commission recommendations to reform policing in NSW.
10 October 2019
BOB CARR. Abandoning the Kurds confirms Asia's view that US power is waning (SMH 9.10.2019)
The Syrian Kurds were more than allies. They were a US client, recruited by the Obama administration for house-to-house combat against the Islamic State caliphate. This America, however, cares little for core relationships and sweeps them aside. The decision shatters the US reputation in Arab states already doubting the reliability of Trumps pro-Sunni gestures. But this abandonment of a good friend will not go unnoticed in Asia.
26 July 2019
THE HON BOB CARR. Tribute to Graham Freudenberg.
The speech arrived on the Premiers desk already clipped into the black leather folder. Did my staff realise that coming from the pen of the master and being a speech of welcome to a US President I would be disinclined to change a word? If so, their instincts were right. Two weeks after Bill Clinton in 1996 had been re-elected as President he and Hillary were in Sydney and without effort or fanfare- or even a word with me- Graham Freudenberg served up eight paragraphs that met the occasion of an official welcome speech with grace and historical resonance.
10 June 2019
BOB CARR. Making a multilateral Belt and Road (East Asia Forum)
Between 2012 and 2030, China will add 850 million people to its middle class. This is unprecedented in human history, even exceeding the numbers of the European, North American and Japanese industrial revolutions. It is the biggest rolling back of poverty within any nation.China deserves to be taken seriously and have its international personality assessed on available evidence, not framed in advance as something inherently disruptive.
12 May 2019
BOB CARR. The China panic and John Fitzgerald.
In a contribution to Pearls and Irritations published on April 16 I took up a point made by Gareth Evans who argued in March that in Australia a new form of Sinophobia is emerging. He said this was one of the reasons Chinese-Australians are underrepresented in senior leadership.