It would be a mistake to dismiss senator Sam Dastyari’s fall from grace as merely the consequence of one politician’s lack of judgment or character. Dastyari’s behaviour illuminates the risk to our democracy of allowing China to exert undue influence over our institutions, society and policies. The problem is that we don’t have a strategy for managing this risk and, until we do, its absence only invites more Chinese interference. Read more
At last there are signs of a tough, even brutal, debate about the implications of the rise of an assertive and Leninist China and its consequences for an Australia that merrily assumes it can stay independent and live by values repudiated in Beijing. Read more
Independence is a powerful, unifying idea that has coursed through Western history from Thermopylae to Catalonia, inspiring nations to greatness and sometimes war. But Australia’s march to independence was relatively uneventful and prosaic. Statues of iconic liberators are notably absent in our cities and towns because there was no war of independence or bloody struggle to throw off the colonial yoke.
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The escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un has fuelled concerns that the region is on a dangerous trajectory to a nuclear conflict that could have calamitous global consequences. Since 1947, nuclear scientists have maintained a ‘Doomsday Clock’ that symbolically measures how close the world is to a man-made global cataclysm, represented by midnight. The clock now shows two and a half minutes to midnight and ticking, the closest it has been to catastrophe since the US exploded the first hydrogen bomb in 1953. Read more
The latest volley of North Korean ballistic missiles, one of which flew over northern Japan, has pushed tensions on the Korean peninsula to a perilous tipping point where war is no longer unimaginable. The real prospect of a military conflict between nuclear-armed North Korea and the US and its allies underscores the recent deterioration in Australia’s security environment. It raises the question of whether our foreign policy is calibrated for the challenges ahead in a world that is becoming a far more dangerous and volatile place.
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Alan Dupont joins the panel on Radio National to discuss recent border flare-ups between India and China, Australia’s new Home Affairs Ministry, and orders for Indonesian police to shoot drug traffickers.
Listen to the full program here.
Are Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s changes to Australia’s intelligence and national security arrangements necessary and genuinely transformational, as he claims? Or are they essentially an exercise in political management aimed at burnishing Turnbull’s national security credentials and ensuring the continuing loyalty of his key conservative ally and current Immigration Minister Peter Dutton?
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Quote: “Dr Dupont, chief executive of strategic risk consultancy The Cognoscenti Group, said the scale of the Marawi uprising, which has seen almost 100 troops, 50 civilians and 400 terrorists killed showed it was significantly planned and financed. He said whether it would be enough to inspire other uprisings was still unknown but a groundswell of Islamic conservatism made for fertile ground for fundamentalist teachings and ultimately extremism.”
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Listen to the show here.
