The politics of terror are going to prove extraordinarily difficult to for the leaders of all political parties around the world, but no more so than in Australia where defence and security have been fourth order issues for so many years. For months now, Australia has been involved in a curious debate about whether to…
The European Community is embarking upon a project which will bring in the weaker – or failing – states of Europe, and a strange mixture of good and bad consequences are likely to follow. Firstly, the hundred million new citizens of the ten extra members of the EU will go up in the world, improve…
Global systems Global systems are creatures that like equilibrium and dislike imbalances. They fear rapid changes and constantly shifting internal alignments, for these, if endemic, can bring about breakdown, even disintegration of the system. And individual centres of power outside but adjacent to the main system, can threaten its stability in other ways. After 1945, our global organisation was essentially bipolar with Superpowers Russia and the USA balancing one another and maintaining order among their various satellites. Nations truly independent of these Powers and their global reach were few and, with the exception of China, comparatively unimportant. With Russia’s collapse…
Goodbye to all that? Surely! Watching Simon Crean and his party struggling with foreign policy and strategic military issues – which have become far more challenging and complex than for many years past – demonstrates yet again how little time and thought mainstream Labor has devoted to these momentous matters. If few votes are hanging on them, or no prospect of a pork barrel for someone or other offers itself, then the Labor managers have usually been content to let the recidivist Left hold the floor while the principal players get on with more serious work. Nowadays, this can mean…
West Papua, the lost neighbour of Australia, only 100km from our northern border, last month commemorated the Indonesian takeover of the territory on 15 August, 40 years ago. As a “military operations area” during the intervening period, news from Irian Jaya, now officially Papua, was often smothered. Only top level assassinations of Papuans were reported…
At the UN Fourth Women’s World Conference in Beijing in 1995, I had a mild confrontation with Pamela Bone who was covering the event for The Age. President Fujimori of Peru had just launched a scathing attack on the Vatican because of the Holy See delegation’s refusal to approve the use of artificial birth control…