The beat Militarising police doesn’t sit well A new study has found that the deployment of heavily armed SWAT teams in the US reduces public support for police but doesn’t reduce crime or increase safety. …
The UK House of Commons Digital, Culture, Sport and Media Committee recently published its interim report on its inquiry into disinformation and ‘fake news’. The report makes a lot of good recommendations, but one in …
After years of negotiations, China and ASEAN have agreed on a single negotiating text for a code of conduct in the South China Sea and a path for future rounds of negotiations. While those are …
President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda is a dramatic departure from US leadership of a multilateral order that has been the guiding norm for over 70 years. That order defines the rules of trade and …
The Irish border is a potent symbol and evidence of how innovative policy can resolve seemingly intractable problems. The extreme political violence that plagued Northern Ireland and Britain only ended with an adjustment to thinking …
Kofi Annan deserves to be remembered as a near-exemplary United Nations secretary-general (SG). Great chief executives need a guiding vision for the exercise of authority, and all the more so when that authority is international civil …
Advocates of stronger and more effective Australian engagement in the South Pacific face a couple of entrenched structural challenges. First, the region is hardly critical to Australia’s economic future—the South Pacific accounts for a mere …
Though the British Labour Party’s anti-Semitism scandal has dominated headlines in the United Kingdom of late, there is a more profound debate with the same theme taking place in Germany. Most worryingly, the fundamental tenets …
Sea state The US has announced a plan to deploy a hospital ship to Colombia to assist with the Venezuelan refugee crisis. The schedule for the departure of the ship, most likely to be USNS …
Schloss Meseberg is a Baroque-style palace that serves as the official guest house of the German federal government. It sits in an idyllic location 70 kilometres north of the capital, and on Saturday Chancellor Angela …
One of the reasons countries support indigenous defence industries is to ensure their sovereign control over defence capabilities. The argument is that by having the ability to design, manufacture and sustain military equipment, a country …
The immediate future of the RAAF’s strike and air combat capability seems clear. We’re getting 72 F-35A joint strike fighters that will form the heart of the force into the 2040s and serve alongside up …
The Kremlin’s foreign policy increasingly seems to rest on the assumption that all countries are as corruptible as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was evident most recently in Russia’s alleged efforts to undermine an agreement between …
On 9 August in South Lebanon, a routine patrol of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was attacked by civilians. In the course of the incident, their vehicles were set on fire and …
While Heisenberg proclaims the uncertainty principle, a public service inquiry operates on the certainty principle. Not for government, Heisenberg’s quantum insight about the impossibility of simultaneously measuring position and momentum; nor the observer effect—that to …
The world Is the Caspian Sea a lake or a sea? For decades this question caused dispute and deadlock between the countries on its shores. On Sunday, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan signed an …
There’s been a lot of focus on the security arrangements for the My Health Record system. Most of the commentary has been about protecting the data, how secure the platform is for storing the data, …
For a long time, I thought that nuclear weapons were a tolerable evil. I bought into the argument that they played a positive role in some circumstances by deterring nations from going to war because …
In this podcast, we discuss Australia’s reset with China, the true cost of our new submarine fleet, big tech companies and online censorship, and Madeleine Nyst interviews Indonesia expert Natalie Sambhi.
Now that Turkey is at loggerheads with its erstwhile ally, the United States, the country’s currency crisis has morphed into a political problem of the first order. The immediate issue is Turkey’s refusal to release …