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Beware Fawning over Untamed China - Peter van Onselen, The Australian

Fawning over China has fast become a staple of political discourse during the 21st century, in Australia and elsewhere in the world. In large part it is understandable, given the e...

Gillard Scales Great Wall to Give Australia China Voice - Sunday Age

China dwarfs Australia in population and scale, but the two countries benefit from living in an economic symbiosis. Drawing closer politically is also a chance to nut through - or ...

Blind U.S. Allies of Mass Destruction - Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning H'ld

George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard collaborated in a war built on a lie. The evidence of lessons learnt is scant....

Australia's Indestructible Prime Minister - Mark Kenny, S.M. Herald

In Australia, strength has always been more ambiguous. Leading into the 1996 election, Paul Keating faced a daunting challenge. A decision was taken to go with his most defining (p...

Mass Transit Is Failing Australia - Wendell Cox, New Geography

Australian urban areas are generally underserved by freeways, despite their overwhelming reliance on personal vehicle travel. At the same time, urban consolidation, “smart gr...

Australia's Brutal Coup Culture - Nick Bryant, BBC News

Australia has one of the most brutal political cultures in the democratic world, in which party leaders are dispatched with abandon. As yet another prime minister faces down a thre...

Australia's Controversial, Female Billionaire - Bill Finnegan, New Yorker

Rinehart believes the mining gospel that she preaches. She believes that she and her fellow-billionaires know best....

How Mining Is Wrecking Australia - Debra Jopson, The Global Mail

Tucked away in the sandstone ridges of the rugged tropics near Australia’s north-eastern tip, the ochre “bullymen” with their big penises and staring eyes still c...

The Sad State of Malaysia - Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald

Malaysia's decision to ban an Australian independent senator, Nick Xenophon, tells us a good deal about the state of its government, the world's longest-ruling outside the communis...

Mossad & Prisoner X: A Real Conspiracy - Richard Spencer, Telegraph Blogs

We all love conspiracy theories, particularly when it's clear there actually was a conspiracy. The odd thing though is that when presented with lots of competing theories, we often...

Asian Century Marked by Rising Conflict - Rory Medcalf, The Australian

Armed tensions in the South China Sea, China and Japan edging to the brink of war, and now a North Korean nuclear test - welcome to the Asian century....

Turning China into an Enemy - Ramesh Thakur, Japan Times

There is increasing discussion in the international press of uneasy parallels — with some pointing to similarities and others highlighting major differences — between the devel...

Will American-Style Politics Ruin Australia? - William Pesek, Bloomberg

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is going American in a big way by setting the next national election seven months from now. The record length of the campaign is bad news fo...

Malaysia's Unwise Hamas Dalliance - The Australian

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has ill-served the cause of anti-terrorism in our region by going to Gaza for talks with Hamas leaders. He became the first non-Arab head of go...

Asia Pivot Imperative as West Fades - Ramesh Thakur, The Australian

In a radically transformed world, there will not be any hegemonic power. Instead, power will be dispersed among states, and diffused from states to informal networks and individual...

A British Comeback in Asia? - Rory Medcalf, The Diplomat

If you believe the rhetoric, Britain is coming back as a security player in Asia. It may not be exactly a reversal of the 1971 East (from London’s perspective) of Suez withd...

Japan Turns to Southeast Asia - Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun

The Japanese are increasingly viewing Southeast Asia as an attractive site for major manufacturing facilities. Production costs are increasingly competitive with China's, where Jap...

Australia Shouldn't Be Smug over Guns - Crispin Hull, Canberra Times

Before we get too self-congratulatory and point the finger at the obvious solution for the U.S., we should recognise the political difficulty of reform and that we experience simil...

Attack Dog Methods Bite Tony Abbott - Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Hld

Tony Abbott's attacking style of politics has reached a point of diminishing returns. More and more voters have recoiled from the Opposition Leader as the year has progressed. His ...

France: The Other Pacific Power - Center for Strategic and Int'l Studies

When discussing Washington's partners in the Pacific, the conversation usually focuses on coordination with Australia and New Zealand. What is often overlooked is the role France p...

As China Rises, So Do Australia's Anxieties - Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg

Australians who are sensitive about their country’s sovereignty have been grumbling about the stationing of 2,500 U.S. Marines in Darwin. On the whole, though, most of those ...

Israel's List of Friends Keeps Getting Shorter - Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg

Shortly after the UN vote, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said, “This day is the day of the historic rout of the Palestinians.” But Israel’...

China Grabbing World's Farmland - Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun

There are many challenging numbers confronting China's new leaders, but two are especially stark. China has 20 per cent of the world's population, but only nine per cent of the wo...

Gillard Can't Ignore Defense Much Longer - Hugh White, S.M. Herald

At the Australia-United States Ministerial Consultation talks this month, the Americans fired a shot across the government's bow. The U.S. sent a clear message that Washington will...

The Knives Are Out for Gillard - Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald

The Gillard government might have been rounding out a year of achievement with the Abbott opposition in retreat, but instead goes into the last week of Parliament facing its greate...

Will Australia Side with China? - John Lee, World Affairs Journal

In August 2012, Australian professor Hugh White released The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power. White argues that America—unchallenged as the preeminent power in Asia ...

Australia Cuts Defense as U.S. Pivots - Greg Sheridan, The Australian

Australia, more than most, loves to have its tummy tickled by the Americans and will go to extravagant lengths to secure this. The Gillard government has virtually begged the Ameri...

Australia Catches Up with the Asian Century - Judith Ireland, Guardian

When the news alert went around last month for the launch of the Gillard government's new white paper, it sparked more than a bit of grumbling. The prime minister, Julia Gillard, h...

West Australia: Hub of Indo-Pacific Age? - Rory Medcalf, The Australian

The symbolism is striking. On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta will meet their Australian counterparts in Perth,Australia's b...

Between Two Giants in a Shrinking World - Sydney Morning Herald

The Chinese democratic process that went on display on Thursday did not cause office workers in Sydney to stand transfixed around television screens as the US election had the day ...

Australia's Place in the 'Asian Century' - Rory Medcalf, The Diplomat

The Asian century is rich, restless and already 12 years old. And, of all nations, Australia stands to be profoundly affected by this era of rapid change – whether the region r...

Think Australia's Wild? Try America - Sydney Morning Herald

AUSTRALIANS like to define their national character by reference to the harsh land we inhabit - droughts and flooding rain, and all that. The response to cyclones and floods that d...

Gillard's Asia Strategy Is Pure Spin - Greg Sheridan, The Australian

The Gillard government white paper on Asia is a fraud. On every level, it is a con job. The government is having a lend of us. Its only admirable quality is its chutzpah. No Austr...

Australia Should Take Itself More Seriously - Peter Hartcher, SMH

Whenever foreign policy enters Australian public debate, a sort of snide smart-alec attitude is never far behind. One of its hallmarks is the stock assumption that Australia is act...

Mixed Results for Gillard's Misogyny Card - Peter Hartcher, Sydney M.H.

Today's poll gives us the first hard evidence to judge the electoral effect of Julia Gillard's famous ''sexist and misogynist'' speech to Parliament last week. And the verdict seem...

Iran, Israel Key to Australia's UN Win - McGeough & Flitton, SMH

The backing of unlikely bed fellows Iran and Israel was key to Australia’s stunning victory in the Security Council campaign....

There's More to Asia Than Aging China - Peter Hartcher, SM Herald

Question. Which country will have the world's fastest-ageing population from 2050? Answer. China. Question. Which country is unique among the world's major powers in having no inde...

Free Speech Dying in the Western World - Jonathan Turley, Wash Post

The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed imflammatory or hateful or discrimi...

Julia Gillard: Gender-General-in-Chief? - Dennis Shanahan, Australian

After starting the class war denigrating mining bosses and billionaires, the Gillard government has launched a gender war and Julia Gillard has appointed herself the gender-gener...

What Misogyny Looks Like in Modern Australia - PM Julia Gillard

Australian PM Julia Gillard slams opposition's sexism claims in fiery speech....

The Japanese Set a Trail for the Asian Century - Sydney Morning Herald

A conference being held in Sydney to mark the 50th anniversary of a formal Australian business connection with Japan is an important reminder, in the context of China's rise as a b...

China and Australia's Coming Divorce - James Parker, The Diplomat

In an interconnected world, “decoupling” is the idea that it’s possible for one country to avoid the transmission of economic pain from another. It holds that, although an ...

Beijing Worrying Many Neighbors - Greg Sheridan, The Australian

Something very strange is happening at the moment in the East China Sea and in the South China Sea, and Australia should be taking serious notice of these developments. In both are...

China Sneezes - Will World Catch Cold? - Vikram Mansharamani, Yale

Over the past three years, there's been a remarkable transformation in global perceptions about the sustainability of Chinese growth. As Europe faltered and the U.S. fought a mass...

Islam Should Accept a Secular State - Paul Kelly, The Australian

The sustained and mass violence in Sydney last weekend represents a failure of Australia's immigration and integration policies and demands a reappraisal from our political elites ...

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