Patrick Walsh, Senior Adviser to the Post-CAVR Technical Secretariat, writes of the re-emergence of calls for an international tribunal for past crimes in Timor-Leste. Walsh notes that “for many this is not fundamentally about Indonesia”, but is about the “destiny of humanity” and is understood in the wider context of “the struggle to overcome the...

Ron Huisken of the Australian National University argues that the strikingly different dimension of Australia's recent Defence White Paper, Force 2030 – “the sharply expanded submarine force and the intent to acquire Australia’s first strategic missile capability – stems from a disjointed, inconclusive but unmistakably alarmist assessment of what China is about to do to...

Richard Leaver and Alex Stephens of Flinders University write that in the Vietnam era Australian policy attitudes to China "begged the question ‘when is your enemy not your enemy?’ and delivered the seemingly obvious answer: ‘when he’s your fifth biggest trading partner’." Yet in its recently released Defence White Paper, "the Australian government has peered...

Malcolm Fraser, former prime minister of Australia, writes that “there has never been a better time to achieve total nuclear disarmament; this is necessary, feasible and urgent.”

Vijay Naidu of the University of the South Pacific argues that the Australian Defence White Paper 2009 “does not successfully incorporate Australia's foreign and economic policies in its immediate neighbourhood as a possible source of instability and security risk." It "proposes the use of ADF with other partners to stabilize countries with fragile states." But...