Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans was Australia’s foreign minister from 1988-96. He is a distinguished honorary professor at the ANU.

Gareth's recent articles

Pursuing Australia's national interests in a 'Might is Right' world

Pursuing Australia's national interests in a 'Might is Right' world

Less America. More Self-Reliance. More Asia. More Global Engagement.

Best of 2024: AUKUS: The worst defence and foreign policy decision our country has made

Best of 2024: AUKUS: The worst defence and foreign policy decision our country has made

Defence Minister Marles’s love for the the US is so dewy-eyed as to defy parody. Foreign Minister Wong is far more beady-eyed, and instinctively wary of over-commitment to America’s view of itself, but has been unwilling to rock the boat.

Celebrating Race Mathews

Celebrating Race Mathews

In this era of totally leader-focused election campaigning, and presidential prime ministers, it is not surprising that political biographers tend to focus almost exclusively just on those who make it to the very top. But, while it might not be a truth universally acknowledged, the reality is that whether parties actually win office, and the extent to which governments achieve anything memorably worthwhile if they do, often depends at least as much on those who never make it quite so far up the greasy pole.

Sheridan wrong on Wong

Sheridan wrong on Wong

Greg Sheridan is doubtless now too long in the tooth to change his journalistic ways. But it really is time that he recognised the force of that immortal observation by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, that ‘Speaking in perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love’.

Defending nation’s sovereignty is not the act of an ‘appeaser'

Defending nation’s sovereignty is not the act of an ‘appeaser'

Could the Alexander Downer who accuses me and Paul Keating of appeasement possibly be the same Alexander Downer who recently wrote in The Australian that if he had a vote in the US Presidential election it would be for Donald Trump? The same Donald Trump whose willingness to accommodate Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine makes Chamberlain’s behaviour in Munich in 1939 seem almost Churchillian?

Independence too big a price for AUKUS fantasy

Independence too big a price for AUKUS fantasy

Paul Keating, Bob Carr and I seem to have jangled a few security establishment nerves with our critique of the AUKUS submarine deal as having profound negative implications for Australia’s security and sovereignty.

Remembering Pete Steedman

Remembering Pete Steedman

Legendary student agitator, Oz-era editor, Hawke-era Parliamentarian, union official, music industry executive and all-purpose provocateur, Pete Steedman died aged 82 on 10 July 2024 after a long battle with cancer. This is one of a number of speeches given at a memorial celebration of his life at the Melbourne Trades Hall on 7 September 2024.

AUKUS: The worst defence and foreign policy decision our country has made

AUKUS: The worst defence and foreign policy decision our country has made

Defence Minister Marles’s love for the the US is so dewy-eyed as to defy parody. Foreign Minister Wong is far more beady-eyed, and instinctively wary of over-commitment to America’s view of itself, but has been unwilling to rock the boat.

The urgency of Palestinian statehood

The urgency of Palestinian statehood

It is time for Israel to recognize the force of the rapidly growing international movement to recognize Palestinian statehood, not as the final outcome of a political settlement but as a path to achieving it.

Why Australia cant rely on the US to save it from China

Why Australia cant rely on the US to save it from China

While there is a measure of agreement among Australian policymakers, and those who influence them, about the severity of regional security challenges we will face in the years ahead, serious divisions persist between Government and Opposition, within the wider think tank, academic and media policy community, and to some extent within the Albanese Government. They relate to the extent and imminence of the security threat posed by China under Xi Jinping; the wisdom of further deepening Australias alliance dependence on the United States; how we should be prioritising our defence preparedness; and how much weight we should be giving to...

A compelling voice for rethinking Australias national security

A compelling voice for rethinking Australias national security

Sam Roggeveens Echidna Strategy rightly challenges Australia to act as a diplomatic powerhouse, not a military one.

The case for recognising Palestine

The case for recognising Palestine

Since a United Nations General Assembly Resolution vote in November 2012, Palestine has had the status of a state within the UN system. It is not a full member state but, like theHoly See, a non-member observer state. Australia after a heady debate within the Gillard cabinet abstained on that vote.

Remembering Bruce Grant: An advocate of Australian self-reliant defence capability

Remembering Bruce Grant: An advocate of Australian self-reliant defence capability

Bruce Grant, who died in August at the great age of 97, made an extraordinary contribution, as a writer and thinker, to Australias understanding of itself as a nation, and our place in the world. His richly well-lived life with its multiple incarnations as journalist, author, university lecturer, diplomat and ministerial adviser was commemorated at a memorial event in Melbourne this month, at which I offered this tribute.

Remarks on the Australia-China divide at the AsiaLink launch of Happy Together, by David Walker and Li Yao.

Remarks on the Australia-China divide at the AsiaLink launch of Happy Together, by David Walker and Li Yao.

arts,  china

The juxtaposition and interweaving of life stories from Australia and China make for endlessly fascinating reading.

Talking up war over Taiwan flouts reason, fact, judgment and Australias national interest

Talking up war over Taiwan flouts reason, fact, judgment and Australias national interest

It is never wise, in foreign affairs and defence policymaking, for emotion to trump reason, for politics to trump objectivity, or for sensitive judgment calls on major national interest issues to be made before they have to be. Talking up, as so many now are, the prospect of war with China with Taiwan as the likely trigger point runs the risk of offending all three prescriptions.

Why the Hawke-Keating government remains the gold standard

You dont have to be partisan or nostalgic to lament the quality of political leadership in Australia. The mediocrity of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison coalition governments, the chronic underperformance of the manifestly more talented Rudd-Gillard Labor governments, and the inability of either side of politics to achieve anything like the creativity and sustained effectiveness of the Hawke-Keating governments of 1983-96, is there for all to see.

Vale Andrew Mack

The many Australian friends and colleagues of Professor Andrew Mack will be deeply saddened to learn he passed away in Vancouver on 20 January 2021 after a year of serious illness.

A Letter to President Biden: Rebuilding US credibility

You will be acutely aware that, after the ravages of the Trump years, you have a big healing job ahead of you, not only at home but abroad.

Australia and China: Getting out of the hole

The Scottish Independent Labour Party leader in the 1930s, Jimmy Maxton, summed up the challenge of political leadership as well as anybody ever has: If you cant ride two bloody horses at once, you shouldnt be in the bloody circus.

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki (The Interpreter 5 August 2020)

Existing nuclear arms control deals are dead or dying, but that should not be an excuse to give up disarmament hopes.

Lessons from the Cambodian genocide: 45 years on

Learning the biggest lesson of all from the Cambodian genocide the need to make Responsibility to Protect (R2P) genuinely effective means above all mobilizing the political will to make something actually happen when it must.

Pressing the pause button on Sinophobia

China is an authoritarian state, and an increasingly assertive one. But there are ways of expressing our concern that are not counterproductive to our national interests.

GARETH EVANS supports Pearls and Irritations

Pearls and Irritationsis perfectly named: lots of immensely thoughtful, insightful and often entertaining pieces mixed up with sometimes wildly contrarian, over-the-top or just plain nutty ones. But always stimulating, provocative and necessary daily reading.

GARETH EVANS. Cambodias Coronavirus Excuse for Human Rights Abuse

Cambodia is not the only country to declare a state of emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the legislation passed last week by Hun Sens government like that in Orbans Hungary should be ringing alarm bells for anyone anywhere concerned with the erosion of human rights and democracy.

GARETH EVANS. How not to conduct Australian foreign Policy: Suez 1956

Dr Robert Bowkers new monograph, Australia, Menzies and Suez: Australian Policy-making on the Middle East Before, During and After the Suez Crisis (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade, 2019), leaves me in awe of his stamina and capacity to absorb punishment.

GARETH EVANS. Emotion, reason and nuclear disarmament

I first came to Hiroshima in 1964 as a twenty-year old student, and it was one of the most formative experiences of my life. Nothing had quite prepared me for the experience of standing at the epicentre of that first nuclear bomb strike, and being overwhelmed by the almost indescribable horror of what had occurred here just two decades earlier

GARETH EVANS. Breaking through the bamboo ceiling: Asian-Australians in the Asian Century.

Asian-Australians are an underappreciated and underutilized national resource as we face the challenges and opportunities of the Asian century. The 2012 White Paper, and everyone else, agrees that we dramatically need to lift our Asian capability defined by the Diversity Council of Australia as meaning individuals ability to interact effectively in Asian countries and cultures, and with people from Asian cultural backgrounds, to achieve work goals.

Asian Australians: Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling (2019 Asialink Sir Edward 'Weary' Dunlop Lecture, Sydney, 13 March 2019)

The award of this year's Weary Dunlop Asialink medal to one of our most distinguished Asian-Australians seems to me an opportune moment to revisit the question of whether we as a nation are making the most in terms of both our external relations and our internal national development of the vast store of talent that exists in the multiple Asian-Australian communities that now make up such a large proportion of our overall Australian community: the Chinese-Australians, Indian-Australians, Vietnamese-Australians, Malaysian and Indonesian and Cambodian and Filipino-Australians, Afghan and Sri Lankan-Australians, Korean-Australians and all the rest who have done so...

GARETH EVANS. Australia in the world: it's time to punch our weight.

In this lecture, Gareth Evans calls for Less America ... More self-reliance ... More Asia ... More global engagement. See below, extracts from Gareth Evans' Tom Uren Memorial Lecture delivered in Balmain 2 December 2018.

GARETH EVANS. How we should manage Donald Trump's meltdown world (Repost from 22/6/2018)

The assumptions that have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades are in meltdown. The post-Second World War global order an open, rules-based system underpinned by a robust network of security alliances, and by effective multilateral institutions in which rules could be agreed and norms reinforced is the only one we have known in our modern history. Its maintenance has depended more than anything else on American belief in the liberal norms laid out in the San Francisco peace treaty and the Bretton Woods organisations. As the Trump administration conspicuously abandons those norms, that order...

GARETH EVANS. How we should manage Donald Trump's meltdown world (AFR 20/6/2018)

The assumptions that have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades are in meltdown. The post-Second World War global order an open, rules-based system underpinned by a robust network of security alliances, and by effective multilateral institutions in which rules could be agreed and norms reinforced is the only one we have known in our modern history. Its maintenance has depended more than anything else on American belief in the liberal norms laid out in the San Francisco peace treaty and the Bretton Woods organisations. As the Trump administration conspicuously abandons those norms, that order...

GARETH EVANS. Trump's US has abdicated global leadership- A REPOST from June 20 2017

Following his presentation at the EU-Australia Senior and Emerging Leaders Forum last week, ANU Chancellor and former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans spoke with Melissa Conley Tyler, Executive Director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Evans said that by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement andprogressivelyshunning its allies, the US has finally abdicated its global leadership role. The days when the US led the world in developing international institutions and laws for the advancement of global goods were now over.

Gareth Evans. Time for the middle powers to step up.

Leadership is one of those things about which its sometimes wise to be careful what you wish for. In the context of Asia Pacific security, there has been far too much preoccupation with who isand will be in the futurethe top dog on the block, and far too little with building the kind of cooperative and collaborative arrangements that will make the region safe and comfortable for all its inhabitantsno matter who has, and for how long, the biggest GDP, the strongest military, the most allies and partners or the most evidently effective soft power. The unwillingness of US...

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