Flashpoint No. 2 – Home truths
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 International relations 5 comments
Highlighting the coalition’s hypocrisy by contrasting its response to Hick’s detention at Guantanamo is a good example, but surely Dr Haneef’s case is a better one.
Flashpoint No. 2 – an update
Monday, 13 July 2009 International relations 4 comments
The media has followed the usual course when an Australian is detained anywhere north of here; that naturally they must be innocent and that international legal standards of decency, remarkably similar to our own, have been contravened.
Flashpoint No. 2
Friday, 10 July 2009 International relations 8 comments
The detention by the Chinese government of an Australian businessman poses far more difficulties for Rudd than would be immediately apparent in the polls.
A quiet bomb goes off
Tuesday, 5 May 2009 International relations, Key posts 13 comments
The coalition is desperately trying to hold on to a more fundamental plank in its policy than China-baiting.
Blowing up in his face
Friday, 17 April 2009 International relations 3 comments
The media has missed that it is not the illegal refugees that is the issue as much as the international context in which it is happening.
Good for pollies, if no-one else
Monday, 6 April 2009 International relations 6 comments
Chris Uhlmann must have clearly enjoyed London because even his anti-government cynicism was swept away by what came out of the G20. It is hard to see why.
The awkward special relationship
Thursday, 2 April 2009 International relations 6 comments
If it is clear that there has a failure to find an international solution, it is bad news for Rudd because he doesn’t really have anything on the domestic front by way of a counter-crisis strategy.
Too big to fail
Monday, 30 March 2009 International relations 2 comments
In effect the US government is putting an economic gun to the head of the other major economic powers and doing to the rest of the world what the major US financial institutions did to it.
Why Bush will forgive Rudd
Monday, 17 November 2008 International relations Comments Off
In a summit of twenty global leaders there are surely a few who are willing to use an international forum to moralise in a way that a Republican US President still cannot. And mishaps aside, Australia’s diplomatic service must be pleased that we have one here.
Change
Thursday, 6 November 2008 International relations Comments Off
Americans have just elected a President who eighteen months ago the Australian Prime Minster said was the preferred choice of Al Qaeda.
