The Port of Darwin lease highlights an urgent need to review how Australia takes account of its national security interests in making decisions about foreign investment.

Overview: The First Principles Review of Defence is arguably the most significant review of the defence establishment since the 1973 re-organisation led by Sir Arthur Tange. This Strategic Insights brings together a series of contributions to ASPI’s blog The Strategist written by ten experts with long experience and broad knowledge of Australia’s defence bureaucracy. They...

Allan Behm from the Canberra security consultancy firm Knowledge Pond writes that “the geophysical and ecological forces that are currently (re)shaping the physical environment add another layer of complexity to the political and economic forces that have hitherto determined the longer-term strategic prospects of Indonesia and Australia. How competently – and proactively – Indonesia and...

Allan Behm of the Canberra group Knowledge Pond, writing after the Nautilus Institute workshop on Mapping Climate Change Complexity in Indonesia and Australia, notes that “for Australia's populous neighbour, Indonesia, the problems of climate change are real and mounting. And Australia has such fundamental security interests in Indonesia that it cannot sit on the sidelines...

An examination of trends concerning the dissolution of marriages and cohabiting relationships.The ways in which Australians form couple relationships have changed dramatically in the 20th century: marriage rates have fallen, those who marry do so at later ages, couples increasingly live together before marrying, and those who divorce are less likely to remarry.