opinion
defence
defence November 21, 2020
The politics of deploying the SAS
The decision to use the SAS on high-tempo deployments was political: it made Australia a useful ally to the US. It may have also contributed to a culture of abuse.
defence June 8, 2019
Morrison goes from royals to rate cuts to raids
As it was for his many predecessors, Scott Morrison and his wife, Jenny, were ushered into the Buckingham Palace parlour the Queen reserves for meeting her prime ministers. The antique two-bar electric heater was not turned on in the fireplace but...
immigration July 22, 2017
Security and Malcolm Turnbull’s bluff
A bloke named Craig Morgan got his 15 minutes of fame this week. Barnaby Joyce identified him as the man who once knocked out his front teeth. “You remember his name?” the journalist at GQ magazine asked. “When someone removes your front teeth, you...
defence February 18, 2017
Recalibrating Australia’s Defence focus and budget
Rather than comprehending that the alliance aims for Australia to be independent, commentary assumes we are inescapably reliant upon the US for our security.
defence October 1, 2016
What really happens at Pine Gap
It’s one of two sacred sites to which you can drive from Alice Springs. The other is the red stone monolith of Uluru, said by the Pitjantjara to bring down a curse on anyone who removes a rock. This one, though, is the huddle of gleaming white...
defence April 30, 2016
Coalition attempts to win votes with submarine politics
The extreme political folly of the Abbott government’s approach to industry policy was dramatically highlighted at Adelaide’s Osborne shipbuilding facility on Tuesday. Owned and operated by ASC, formerly the Australian Submarine Corporation, an...
defence March 5, 2016
Defence white paper seeks to address shortfalls
The figure is $450 billion. It’s a sum so colossal it almost defies understanding: nearly a third of Australia’s annual gross domestic product. It’s also how much the government plans to spend on defence in the next decade. The current defence...
defence November 28, 2015
Heat on for Malcolm Turnbull ahead of Paris conference
As he heads to Paris for the 21st conference of the parties (COP 21), Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t have the survival of the species top of mind. The United Nations-sponsored climate talks have the ambition to lay the framework for an international...
middle east October 3, 2015
There are Gordian knots, and then there are Gordian knots. And the Syrian conflict, on which Australia’s new government must rapidly find a new policy approach, is a Gordian knot of epic proportions. At the local level, the Syrian conflict is a...
defence August 1, 2015
Boots on the ground, head in the clouds
Nearly a year ago Daesh fighters herded Yazidi men and women to the top of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, killing hundreds along the way. That series of massacres, along with the capture of Mosul a month earlier, catalysed global attention and...
defence July 4, 2015
Tony Abbott’s ABF and excessive use of higher force
The last thing the prime minister wanted to talk about on the first day of the new financial year was the economy. Firmly on his agenda is the existential threat to Australia posed by a “death cult”, and boat people. Both politically more fertile...
