Job done for China’s ambassador — but 2025 will be much harder

by Peter Jennings | Jan 2, 2025 | China, Policy, Uncategorized

China’s ambassador Xiao Qian has replaced wolf warrior language with silken tofu. According to his interview with this newspaper’s defence correspondent, Ben Packham, the bilateral relationship has achieved a “full turnaround” from the bad days when Canberra...

Labor must explain why it’s trashed a historic friendship

by Mike Kelly and Anthony Bergin | Dec 19, 2024 | Policy

In her recent Hawke Oration delivered on Monday night, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said we expect both Russia and China to abide by international law and expect Israel to do the same She has never specified whether Israel is not complying with the law or what law is...

Another Brick in the Wall: Education, not control can help young Australians with social media

by Peter Jennings | Nov 28, 2024 | Policy

The Labor government’s mis- and disinformation bill died in the Senate this week and rightly so. The bill was a power grab for information control, giving bureaucrats oversight over how social media platforms would find and fix information “reasonably verifiable as...

When free trade ain’t free: Xi Jinping plays pretend with our enthusiastic prime minister

by Michael Shoebridge | Nov 26, 2024 | China, Indo Pacific, Policy

Back in 2017, early into Donald Trump’s first term as US President, China’s Communist Party leader Xi Jinping turned up to the Davos world economic forum and told the assembled corporate heavyweights and global leaders that China embraced globalisation and was...

PM’s precarious US-China juggling is about to reach its use by date

by Peter Jennings | Nov 25, 2024 | China, Policy

Anthony Albanese described his dialogue with Xi Jinping in Brazil last Monday as “crucial” and his personal engagement with the Chinese leader as steering a “patient, calibrated and deliberate approach (that) created many thousands of new jobs in Australia” The two...