Defence and Security
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. What was all that about?
Afghan troops who were trained in Uruzgan until 2013 by Australian soldiers are now reportedly confined to barracks. More for their own safety than the protection of the province, it seems, because the Taliban have waited them out and are progressively taking back control of Uruzgan, just as contending forces have done in Afghanistan Continue reading »
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Defence & Australian Strategic Policy Institute – Joined at the Hip
Following on John Menadue’s recent item in which he dissected the funding of Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the pervasive influence of the ‘Australia/US Defence and Intelligence Complex’ of which ASPI is a part, he questioned whether ASPI as a supposedly independent source of strategic advice could provide the advice necessary to get the Continue reading »
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TONY KEVIN. ‘Putin meets Turnbull’: an interesting encounter at Hangzhou.
Chris Ullmann’s ABC News report on main outcomes for Australia of the Hangzhou G20 Summit led with an account of an impromptu ‘encounter’ between Malcolm Turnbull and Vladimir Putin. Maybe they bumped into one another in the hotel lift or corridors? We don’t know which side initiated this conversation, but it could be a Continue reading »
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NICK DEANE. Reflecting on Troubled Waters. South China Sea
The dispute in the South China Sea should not, legitimately, involve Australia. We are only involved because we have such close military ties with the United States. War between the US and China is not inevitable, but dangerous, military escalation is taking place. If hostilities break out, the war will be on our doorstep. Continue reading »
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WALTER HAMILTON. What’s in it for Putin?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pursuing a ‘fresh approach’ with Russia’s Vladimir Putin for resolving the territorial dispute that has prevented the two countries signing a peace treaty since World War Two. It is easy to see what Abe might hope to gain from a settlement, but no breakthrough can be expected unless Continue reading »
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JULIA BAIRD. Australia’s Gulag Archipelago.
In Dante’s view, the unfortunate souls who dwell in purgatory may suffer excruciating pain, but the promise of their final destination is clear: paradise. Those who languish on the remote, tiny islands — Manus and Nauru — that host Australia’s offshore immigration detention centers are not so lucky. Continue reading »
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. Do we need a White Paper on Australia’s foreign policy?
A White Paper could be useful if it is agreed to by the key ministers of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, and Immigration and Border Protection ; and consistently applied by the Cabinet. A major problem which I see is that we seem to be in a period of fairly intense political and bureaucratic infighting over Continue reading »
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ROSS BURNS. Looking for an end-game in Syria.
Newspaper commentary on the Syria conflict has long struggled to provide new insights into the conflict. However, in an analysis published over the weekend in the New York Times, Max Fisher, adopted the novel approach of asking academic experts to comment on how other civil wars came to an end to see if any Continue reading »
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MEREDITH BURGMANN. ASIO and dirty secrets.
In commenting this week, Meredith Burgmann said that ‘my view is that the stories in my book (Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files. New South Wales Publishing, Sydney 2014) collectively represent ASIO as being improper, incompetent, irrelevant, inappropriate and intrusive.’ The following are extracts from her book. Continue reading »
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TONY KEVIN. A successful reawakening of serious Russian studies in Australia ?
Doctor Dorothy Horsfield of Australian National University is to be congratulated for her vision and hard work in mounting the first serious academic Russian studies conference in Australia for many years, ‘Putin’s Russia in the Wake of the Cold War’, on 24-26 August, under the auspices of the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre Continue reading »
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. A Foreign Affairs White Paper. What is there to inquire about?
We have just had a Federal election, so now the inquiry season has begun. The government already has a Royal Commission inquiring into the detention of children in the Northern Territory, it wants a plebiscite on gay marriage, the inquiry into institutional child abuse is still running, and the Opposition wants one on the Continue reading »
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PAUL BARRATT. Would war powers reform really leave national security in the hands of the minority parties?
During a segment on war powers reform on ABC TV’s current affairs program Lateline (25 August – see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-25/mps-call-for-iraq-war-inquiry/7786424 ) Australian Strategic Policy Institute Executive Director Peter Jennings expressed opposition to parliamentary involvement in decision-making about deployment of the ADF, saying: If you look at how parliaments are structured, you’re really saying that you’re Continue reading »
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WALTER HAMILTON. Stand off in the East China Sea
About eighteen months ago, while talking with a policy analyst at Japan’s Defense Ministry in Tokyo, I asked how the confrontation with China over the disputed Senkaku (or Daioyu) Islands in the East China Sea was affecting morale in the Self-Defense Forces. ‘I recently visited Sasebo,’ he replied, referring to the southern base of Continue reading »
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RICHARD BUTLER. Nuclear disarmament – Australia’s Profound and Cynical Failure.
In 1995 Prime Minister Keating established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. He did this because he was appalled at the intensity of the, mainly US/USSR, nuclear arms race. He wanted to find a safe way in which nuclear weapons could be eliminated, to which international agreement might be given. The Continue reading »
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ANDREW MACK. ‘National security’ and the Ausgrid bid
On 19th August Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison confirmed his earlier decision to block the NSW government’s planned lease of 50.4 per cent of the New South Wales Ausgrid electricity distribution network to two Chinese companies: the Chinese government-owned State Grid Corporation of China and Hong Kong listed Cheung Kong International (CKI). Morrison based his Continue reading »
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RICHARD BROINOWSKI. The Battle of Long Tan turns Fifty
Some excitement was generated in the Australian press around 15 August when it was reported that the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan would be commemorated by Australians at the site of the battle at a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy Province. So it was – by a small and subdued Continue reading »
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DAVID STEPHENS. How we commemorate our wars in other people’s countries.
‘We need to talk about how we commemorate our wars in other people’s countries – and our own’, Honest History, 18 August 2016 “How would we feel if 1,000 Japanese turned up in Darwin wanting to celebrate the bombing of 1942.” Apart from the Frontier Wars against Indigenous Australians, all of Australia’s wars, from New Zealand in Continue reading »
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BRIAN TOOHEY. The quality of intelligence advice.
A former top US intelligence official David Gompert has issued a sober warning to those who want to lock Australia into any future war with China. Speaking on Monday, Gompert said a war between the US and China could be so ruinous for both countries and the world that it might seem unthinkable, yet Continue reading »
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CAVAN HOGUE. Handing over our Defence to a foreign country.
The Government has refused to allow a Chinese firm to invest in electricity because it is seen as a threat to our security but it has no difficulty in handing over our defence to a foreign country. Australian defence forces are so integrated with the US that it is hard to see how we can Continue reading »
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RICHARD BROINOWSKI. Merchants of Death – the Weapons Trade
According to Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in The Untold History of the United States (2012), North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye persuaded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1934 to investigate the enormous profits made by American weapons makers during the Great War. Amplifying public indignation, Fortune magazine ran an article in March of Continue reading »
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SPENCER ZIFCAK. Counter-terrorism and human rights.
I am presently in Paris. Along with many other countries, France faces a terrorism threat. France is grappling with the problem of how democracies can best handle threats of terrorism. In light of that I am reposting an earlier article from the Policy Series, by Spencer Zifcak, on human rights and combatting terrorism. John Menadue Continue reading »
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WALTER HAMILTON. Japan’s Diminishing Returns.
Japan, in my nearly forty years of observing and reporting on that country, has never been so delicately and dangerously poised. Australians, who have long relied on it as an economic powerhouse and ‘common interest’ partner, need to be paying close attention. Continue reading »
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JON STANFORD and JOHN MENADUE. The submarine confusion continues. Is the way being prepared for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines?
REPOST In an interesting development relating to Australia’s new submarine acquisition, Peter Jennings, Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has written a piece in The Australian (7 June 2016) that is clearly at odds with the Institute’s previous public stance. Jennings says that while conventional power for Australia’s submarines has previously been Continue reading »
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The South China Sea, China, Philippines, Australia and the US.
I was surprised the Opposition did not differentiate itself from the Australian Coalition Government’s strong support for the US and the Philippine position on the South China Sea issue. It can be argued that it was misleading to state in public that the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) judgment in favour of the Philippines was Continue reading »
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. What Chilcot doesn’t say.
Comprehensive though the Chilcot report is, and 12 volumes long, its promised revelations about how Britain went to war in Iraq and the lessons to be learnt are incomplete. What’s missing is particularly important for Australia, which has yet to hold such an inquiry, and where public pressure for one is mounting. Continue reading »
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ANN TULLOH. Terrorism in France and a sense of hopelessness by many young people.
I was brought up on the ABC news coming from the sitting room loud enough to cover the house as Dad got himself going every morning. This was in the 50s and any terrible overseas news was so far away that I didn’t feel concerned. (I much preferred a programme around 8am when songs were Continue reading »
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GREG WOOD. “Only a fool…” Australia, Iraq, and other such wars.
The Chilcot report in the UK has renewed calls for an examination of Australia’s intelligence system in the lead up to the Iraq war. Far less subject to scrutiny, but arguably more important still than the accuracy of the intelligence, was the nature of the advice provided to the Howard government by policy departments Continue reading »
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MICHAEL WESLEY. The dangerous politics of national security. (Repost from Policy Series)
In January 2013, as she launched her government’s National Security Strategy, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard proclaimed that Australia’s decade of terrorism was over. Her argument was that al Qaeda had failed to regenerate after being degraded in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and that there were other more conventional security issues, such Continue reading »
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The American alliance and Vice President Biden’s recent visit
Vice President Biden’s speech at the Paddington Town Hall on 20 July was by invitation only. I had met Vice President Biden three years ago in Washington when I was on the Board of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. He was friendly and somewhat more impressive than I had expected and certainly had very competent staff around him. Continue reading »
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STEPHEN FITZGERALD. Security in the region. (Repost from Policy Series)
Paul Keating and Gareth Evans used to claim, with justification, that by the mid-1990s Australia had become ‘the odd man in’ in Asia. This was in significant part because of the headway they’d made in Southeast Asia, with ASEAN countries, in gaining acceptance of Australia as ‘one of them’. This was no slogan. Behind it Continue reading »