Asia

There has been plenty of diplomatic semantics around the American presence in Darwin but many including the Chinese are still not satisfied. The United States has long wanted a permanent military base in northern Australia.

But they are not stupid. 

So when Australian officials conveyed that a fixed establishment would not be politically palatable here they saved us the embarrassment of having to say no in a high-level bilateral meeting if the request was made.

Continue reading "A more permanent US presence no baseless rumour" »

US President Obama and Russian President Medvedev will attend the sixth East Asia Summit in Bali this Saturday, November 19.  This historic development will make the East Asia Summit one of the world’s most important leadership forums.  It will also be another signal of a continuing global power shift that will make the 21st century the Asian Century.

US and Russian participation in the East Asia Summit represents an extraordinary achievement for an Asian integration process initiated by (originally 6, now 10) ASEAN countries during the Cold War. US military primacy will continue for at least for the first half of the 21st century, highlighting the importance for Australia of the ANZUS alliance.

President Obama will celebrate the 60th anniversary of ANZUS this morning in a speech to a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament. The ANZUS alliance protects Australia with US nuclear deterrence capability that is likely to remain an effective deterrent of military adventurism by a ‘rising’ China.

Continue reading "Australia farewells Obama, welcomes Asian Century" »

Last week’s default to onshore asylum seeker processing is not a story of government incompetence. It isn’t even a story of partisan gridlock. At its heart this is about of our collective failure to grasp what it means to live in an interconnected world. We are yet to leave our foreign policy training wheels.

My most visceral reaction to this announcement was a feeling that we’ve lost control over our ability to shape events in the national interest. The political stalemate highlights not only the Gillard Government’s current lack of an authentic asylum seeker policy, but also a broader paradigm that suggests our leaders don’t control the big decisions anymore.

But we lost control long before last week. In the 10 years of the Howard Government, there were over 13,000 asylum seeker arrivals; in the course of the Rudd/Gillard Governments, there have been no more than 5,000. The perception of asylum seeker control in the Howard era was just that – a perception of control.

Continue reading "We’re all at sea without a strong regional vision" »

I’ve always half-liked the Labor Government’s Malaysian solution on asylum seekers. I like the half that involves bringing an additional 4000 refugees from Malaysia to Australia. It’s a small additional burden that our rich little country is very capable of bearing.

It’s quite a clever strategy, too, in light of new research showing humanitarian arrivals are generally younger and more likely to live in regional areas, thereby helping to counter our rapidly ageing, urbanised population.

But I abhor the other half of the equation – the part that involves sending 800 asylum seekers to Kuala Lumpur, where 90,000 mostly Burmese are already rotting in a refugee quagmire in the hope of a better life they’ll never get.

Continue reading "Malaysia’s no dumping ground for our refugees" »

With foreign policy barely rating a mention in the election campaign, the strongest indication we will have of the eventual winner’s view on the world is where they decide to go first.

Like most elections this campaign wasn’t fought on foreign policy.

Even with the tragic deaths of three soldiers in Afghanistan it was a passing topic. Tony Abbott did promise to dump Australia’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council and appoint a Minister for International Development. But the closest we got to a genuine debate on our place in the world was one about which island country to our north to send asylum seekers.

Continue reading "The foreign affairs guessing game: first stop for the PM?" »