Countries participating in the first East Asia Summit will be the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) and China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. In this e-brief Frank Frost and Ann Rann provide...

After a brief overview of economic developments and political issues, the paper discusses China’s overall approaches in foreign policy and its relations with the United States, Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.

Despite the changes to personal income tax in the 2005–06 federal budget, there are continued calls for reform of the Australian taxation system. An often mentioned point in favour of the reform of the personal income tax system is that Australia’s current arrangements are ‘uncompetitive’ with the arrangements applying in other countries. In this research...

Luke Buckmaster provides a brief overview of RU486 and its use in medical abortion, an explanation of its current legislative status in Australia, and a brief analysis of the current debate about overturning legislative restrictions on RU486 and similar abortion drugs in Australia introduced at the instigation of Senator Brian Harradine in 1996.

Peter Prince and Thomas John examine the extent of the Commonwealth’s power under the Australian Constitution to establish a single national industrial relations system.