Caroline Kennedy, the nominee for US ambassador to Australia, has said the Aukus security deal will provide “a lot of deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific even before the nuclear-powered submarines are ready. With Australia set to enter a federal election campaign within days, Kennedy praised the country for standing firm with “a bipartisan foreign policy” in the face of “Chinese economic coercion”. But she also said the prospect of a security agreement between China and Solomon Islands showed the US needed to be “more visible” in the Pacific. Kennedy said the…
Tag: Australian security and counter-terrorism
Labor warns China it should not ‘take comfort’ from Russian invasion of Ukraine
Labor’s shadow foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should not embolden China’s regional ambitions as she called for the “strongest possible sanctions” against Moscow by the Australian government. While declining to comment specifically on whether events in Europe increased the likelihood of China moving on Taiwan, Wong said no country should see Russia’s invasion as “any justification” for challenging the status quo in the region. “It is the case that what is occurring is relevant to our region, is relevant to the whole world, where…
Essential poll analysis: Coalition’s national security scare campaign may have backfired
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Scott Morrison’s China gambit is a Hail Mary from a flailing leader trying to galvanise fear | Peter Lewis
Scott Morrison’s efforts to politicise Australia’s complex relationship with China seems to be further soiling his own flagging reputation. Like a bull in the proverbial, he has spent the past fortnight bombarding the airwaves with hastily googled dossiers and cold war-era panics to suggest an Albanese government would become an antipodean branch office of the Beijing Politburo. Large sections of the national gallery have embraced his China pivot, breathlessly reporting the attacks on Labor, amplifying intelligence community blowback and catastrophising operational incidents that would normally demand sober assessment rather than…
Former Asio boss accuses Liberal senator of ‘grubby’ attack over Huawei comments
One of Australia’s most respected former public servants, Dennis Richardson, has accused Liberal senator James Paterson of engaging in a “grubby” and “despicable” attempt to blacken his name over comments Paterson made in an interview on Sky News. Paterson, the chair of federal parliament’s powerful committee on intelligence and security, argued in the interview on Thursday that Richardson, the former head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, had publicly advocated in 2018 that the Chinese telco Huawei should be involved in the Australian 5G rollout. Paterson described Richardson as a…
Morrison and Dutton are imperilling Australia’s national security to hang on to power | Katharine Murphy
Too often, political journalism is the art of asking the wrong question. We can preoccupy ourselves wondering whether or not a particular tactic will work. These are valid enough deductions, but the whole exercise can read like theatre criticism. At the moment, there is only one question to ask, and it’s this. Is it right for Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton to weaponise national security in the run-up to an election they evidently fear they could lose? If you ask the correct question, the answer is simple and clear. The…