There is nothing inevitable about the triumph of autocrats. But resistance requires both diplomacy and deterrence - and Australia does not have enough of either …
The next war won't be a Chinese battleship sailing through the Sydney Heads. It will be one of Beijing's long-range strike missiles, capable of striking the Australian mainland in just 30 minutes.
Memo to China: You Look Silly When You Threaten to Dump Treasuries
If China intends to cov the West, it needs to pick things it could do that would incur real damage. Selling Treasuries it not that.
Australia’s lessons from Taiwan and Ukraine
If the point is ultimately to make the world a better, safer, saner place, that demands engagement – and to recognise there can be a wrong and a right side of history.
Bob Carr was in his element as he introduced Richard Broinowski who shared few colourful quotes from Whitlam to Elis on Monday night at Maroubra Junior Club
The graffiti screeched, “No to the Frogs.” Perfume and cognac sales plummeted. Newspaper columnists unleashed a flurry of invective against “Napoleonic arrogance.” Sydney’s annual Cointreau Ball was canceled on Bastille Day. And zealots burned down the offices of the honorary French consul in Perth.
Playwright Bob Ellis wrote in Sydney’s Telegraph Mirror that the French “are a dense and arrogant people, idle, pretentious and rabbit-slaughtering, all of the men identical, as Gore Vidal so rightly noted--pot belly, green skin, stubble, limp cigarette on long wet underlip unlit but somehow dribbling ash in acres.”
Franca Arena, a member of New South Wales’ state legislative council, and some colleagues were entertaining South African legislators aboard a cruise ship in Sydney harbor on the day Chirac announced the resumption of French tests. That was when she came up with the idea that legislators should steam toward the French testing site at Mururoa in protest.
Arena, a member of Keating’s party, ignored his tepid response to France’s plans and soon joined another New South Wales legislator, Ian Cohen, a member of the Green Party, in organizing a shipload of 60 lawmakers from 16 countries, accompanied by 40 reporters.
Sometimes slang cuts through and helps us understand. Earlier this week, we had a piece about brown-nosing in the context of Australia-US relations. (We discovered that even the word ‘brown-nosing’ originated in the US. Probably.)
See also this from last week, articles by Michelle Fahy and Binoy Kampmark.
And Hugh White in The Monthly on the US Alliance and Afghanistan. The seven paras towards the end, commencing ‘This brings us back to Australia’, are a damning assessment of Australian ‘strategy’ over the last 20 years.
Plus Carol Johnson in Inside Story on our retreat to the Anglosphere.
Richard Philip Broinowski (born 8 May 1940) is a former Australian public servant and diplomat. He worked in Mexico, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, Iran and Burma, including as Ambassador to Mexico, Ambassador to Vietnam, and Ambassador to South Korea.
The memoir of Australian former diplomat Richard Broinowski
DRIVEN is a memoir by distinguished Australian former diplomat Richard Broinowski, with a particular focus on the cars he has loved and driven in Australia and his various postings in Asia, the Middle East, and North and Central America. this makes for an entertaining way of looking at various cultures (their driving behaviour, traffic conditions and road rules) and his career as an Australian ambassador. Part offbeat travel book, part career memoir, it is an engaging and personal look at one man's life and enduring loves. Perfect reading for car nostalgia buffs and lovers of travel books and biographies alike.
The world owes Ukraine a staggering debt.
In an age when we disparage democratic societies for their cynicism, fracturing and trivial self-absorption, the people of Ukraine are redefining freedom and what it means to fight for it.
This should resonate as much in Australia as in any other country that respects human dignity and the sovereignty of nations.
Is Bob Carr wearing rose coloured glasses? Neither Albanese nor Marles is behaving the way he says
It would be very comforting if Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles were adopting the ̵…
Ambassador Xiao Qian
Ambassador of the People's Republic of China
"Address to the National Press Club of Australia"
2017-2021 Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic
of China to the Republic of Indonesia
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