As Spain’s Operacion Puerto trial neared the end of its second week, the Australian Crime Commission has released a report that exposes what it calls widespread doping in many Australian sports along with links to organized crime involved in the supply of doping products and match fixing. This report follows up the USADA Armstrong case […]
Tag Archives: Australia
Australia enters 2013 reconsidering its place in a strategically shifting world. Issues close to home have stabilised and, increasingly, considerations further from Australia are being written off as a lost cause. Australia’s peace-keeping commitment to East Timor has ended, with that country now charting an independent and, for the medium future at least, stable course. […]
From a sleepy backwater, the South Pacific has been catapulted into the diplomatic limelight, with the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in the Cook Islands playing host not just to Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, but to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and a large delegation from China. All of a sudden, the Pacific island […]
When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, part of its justification was that the then ruling Fretilin intended to allow the country to become a regional base for China. Fretilin had recently assumed power, having defeated the conservative UDT’s attempted coup in August of that year. But Fretilin’s victory was viewed in Indonesia as establishing […]
At a time of unprecedented good bilateral relations with Indonesia, Australia is now looking to its future. Indonesias shift towards a more open democratic framework has allowed the previously troubled relationship to stabilise, but its future remains uncertain, especially over the medium to longer term. The renewed focus on relations with Indonesia reflects its continuing […]
This article appeared in the Sunday Debate page in the Herald Sun, 15 January 2012. To read the argument from the anti-whaling side (Sea Shepherd), please go to the following link. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/commercial-whaling-in-the-southern-ocean-yes-or-no/story-fn6bn88w-1226244372581 ************************************************************* Before talking about the whaling in the Southern Ocean IT IS quite unfortunate that the current debate on whaling is somehow focusing […]
To whale or not to whale … THAT should be the question I was simply amazed when I read a small online Japanese article about a week ago. It was reporting the departure of three whaling ships from Shimonoseki, former whaling town in the western Japan, heading for the Antarctic. I was amazed not that […]
The move by Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce, to ground the Qantas fleet around the world, will have caused significant damage to the brand, regardless of his motives for doing so. To some degree, you could argue that the Australian public were conscious of the ongoing negotiations with pilots, engineers and baggage handlers (although knowing this level […]
Although Australia has repeatedly expressed its solidarity and support with the Arab uprisings and has called for a no-fly zone to be imposed on Libya, what exactly Australia should learn from the popular democratic movements sweeping across the region has yet to be considered. The dramatic sequence of pro-democracy movements that are emerging in the […]
The line attributed by Mark Twain to British PM Benjamin Disraeli that there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ might be held to be true when assessing the value of indicators. Indicators, after all, only indicate, so there is scope for debate about the meaning of the UNDP’s Human Development Index, identified by Robert Johnson […]