The proposition that Australia should spend the next decade seeking observer status in ASEAN will get lots of kicks in Southeast Asia. However, the kicks in Canberra about joining ASEAN are nearly as hard. Canberra’s …
Articles by: "Graeme Dobell"
Australia should join the Association of South East Asian Nations. And to promote this big call even higher up the mountain to be climbed, Australia will become a member of ASEAN. The ‘should’ and ‘will’ …
Worry about the sharemarket when cabbies offer hot buying tips. Quit the market when brokers claim: ‘this boom is different!’ The claim history has been defeated—‘This time it’s different!’—is ever an alarm. With that …
Australian has lots of nasty fauna. Crocodiles. Sharks. Spiders. Then there’s that dangerous, unpredictable species—the Oz politician, a breed that catches and kills its own, frequently and ferociously. Tony Abbott’s demise has prompted angst about …
If we wait for Australia and India to develop a common regional vision, we’ll wait forever. Some things will never happen. At least, though, the astigmatism that’s long afflicted the Oz–India ‘views’ of each other …
The differences between Australia and India will be bridged by systemic needs and policy problems, not by leadership will. Instead of leadership chemistry, the drivers can be the convergence of strategic interests and the great …
The slow and stuttering course of the Australia–India relationship over the last 70 years has been troubled by the Curse of the Cs. The Cs are about what the two Indian Ocean states seem to …
Singapore and Australia have nothing in common but share much. No similarities, yet multiple places where interests and attitudes touch or chime. Geographically, they are mismatched mates: the nation with a continent to itself shares …
Australia is re-embracing the Indo–Pacific as the defining geographic expression of defence strategy. The Indo–Pacific was the big new theme of Labor’s 2013 Defence White Paper, and it’ll have the same status in the Coalition’s …
Australia is offering India a renewed geostrategic embrace and an economic deal—notable efforts by Canberra to strengthen geostrategic convergence with India and to deepen geo-economic linkages. The bilateral effort with India feeds the regionalist understanding …
A few days after kicking Singapore out of the federation in 1965, Malaysia’s leader Tunku Abdul Rahman had a news conference to discuss the traumatic political divorce. The avuncular aristocrat was typically chirpy as he …
Australia’s nightmare about the US alliance has two versions: home alone or crushed by the embrace. Opposing dreads: Oz abandoned versus Oz abused. For decades, home alone was dominant. Oz would call but Washington would …