It may be an uncomfortable truth, but Australia has monumentally mishandled its relationship with China. If the future with our largest trading partner is now uncertain, we overwhelmingly have ourselves to blame. China is Australia’s largest trading partner – it has been sheer luck that Australia has had the commodities that a booming China wants […]
Tag Archives: diplomacy
Within 24 hours of the US air strike on an air base in Syria last week, the US claimed it was not pursuing regime change. That was a ‘kiss of death’. Four days later, as he landed on Russian soil, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Syria’s President Bashar al Assad must go. […]
Australias diplomatic relationship with Indonesia has gone from bad to worse following the latest damaging revelations about Australian spying on senior Indonesian political figures, including President Yudhoyono and his wife Ibu Ani. Indonesia is now expected to act on the matter, expelling Australian diplomats and suspending joint information gathering programs. The most troubling aspect of […]
There are a number of ways to interpret Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s failure to raise his asylum seeker ‘tow back’ proposal in his meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, but none of them are positive. In short, the ‘town back’ proposal was – and in so far as it continues to be defended by […]
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 […]
It seems that no matter how cordial Australia’s relationship with Indonesia is or how much it is desired to be so, perennial issues continue that call aspects of that relationship into question. Critically, the gap between how Australia official engages with Indonesia and how that engagement is more widely viewed within Australia continues to test […]