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defence
defence December 6, 2025
How to restore Australia’s national security
A new word has recently been added to Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary , which means it can be used officially in our lexicon – even by the ABC. “Enshittification” is self-explanatory. Coined to describe the modus operandi of the high-tech IT sector...
defence July 11, 2025
The cockney rhyming slang, traditionally beloved of Australians, would have it that our old china plates in America are causing us more anxiety than our newer ones in North Asia. The prime minister is winging his way to Beijing for a week of high-...
defence June 20, 2025
High expectations had been set for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s meeting with United States President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley sent him off with the relatively constructive comment that, “The...
defence June 14, 2025
Can Albanese fix Australia’s defence?
The news that Washington is reviewing the AUKUS submarine deal puts a bombshell under Australia’s defence policy and sharpens the debate of recent weeks about defence spending. In that debate, suddenly 3 per cent is the new 2 per cent. For 30 years...
defence May 3, 2025
The debt trap of defence spending
One of the great disappointments of our election campaign has been the failure to focus more explicitly and substantively on the adequacy of our defence. The best we got was a repeated acknowledgement of the challenges in the prospective global...
defence March 8, 2025
Why Australia’s response to China must be measured
On February 14, exactly one week before China’s naval flotilla began live-fire drills off the coast of Eden, New South Wales, Japan’s defence minister released information about his nation’s interactions with the Chinese navy. In the previous year,...
defence July 27, 2024
Canada rejects AUKUS nuclear submarine deal
Some news this month might have given the government pause. Canada – with the longest coastline in the world and a security situation in its Arctic and north changing significantly as the region becomes more accessible, particularly with more...
defence June 22, 2024
The black-and-white of panda diplomacy
The first visit of a Chinese premier to Australia in seven years perfectly demonstrated the complexity of the relationship with our biggest customer. It also confirmed that for Australia’s continued prosperity, accommodating Beijing is not optional...
defence April 13, 2024
Energy security must be a government planning priority
Poor strategic planning is a disturbing feature of government in this country. It may be attributable in part to the short political cycle, which mandates a federal election within three years. In any case, it contrasts sharply with the rest of the...
defence March 30, 2024
The nuclear threat Australia is ignoring
In August 1939, a month before the outbreak of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt advising that a large mass of uranium could be used to make “extremely powerful bombs of a new type”. Fearing...
indigenous affairs November 18, 2023
Life in the time of polycrisis
Why does so much feel like it’s going wrong, all at the same time? Why do so many of us feel this sense of impending doom? According to experts, we are living through a “polycrisis”, a tangled mess of multiple crises, all happening at once. In the...
