As regular folks in Canberra were closing down for the summer break, Graeme Dobell was on a writing roll for The Strategist. He questioned the still freshly minted Prime Minister’s attachment to values in Australia’s …
Articles by: "Robert Ayson"
In the flurry of criticism over China’s air defence identification zone in the South China Sea, the fact that New Zealand’s Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman has been visiting his Chinese counterpart has been lost in …
One thing New Zealand is never accused of internationally is throwing too much money around on defence. Those impressions aren’t about to be challenged any time soon, but Defence Minister Jonathan’s Coleman’s recent speech to …
If you read some of the media coverage of this week’s meeting between US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and New Zealand Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman, you might have thought that the two countries have just …
In one of his first comments as the Defence Minister in Tony Abbott’s new government, David Johnston said that the ADF needs to be equipped to help safeguard regional sealanes. It’s easy to see this …
Call me a bleeding heart, but I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that something simply must be done about the Syrian chemical weapons attacks. I’m not the only normally peaceful soul who …
For a while now defence officials and analysts on both sides of the Tasman have been looking for ways to re-energise the Australia-New Zealand relationship. It’s almost as if the two neighbours were becoming too …
It can be rather disconcerting for a New Zealand audience when they are faced with an Australian who wants to praise our defence policy. We don’t quite know whether to celebrate or to question the …
View Larger Map My favourite line about Australian strategic thinking belongs to Graeme Dobell. The ‘arc of instability’, he quipped on more than one occasion, was a polite way of talking about Indonesia. Having read …
Imagine a parallel universe where the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers conclude their annual meeting by announcing that they’d get together the next time there was a large enough issue to require their mutual …
It’s hard to get folks excited about the Australian–New Zealand defence relationship. It’s uncontroversial because we’re already close partners in a fairly low octane South Pacific neighbourhood, where we’re expected to work together. And it’s …
If I understand Peter Jennings correctly, his response to Leon Panetta’s visit to New Zealand consists of three parts. First, there is a touch of bemusement about how far the United States has bent over …