The pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong has been leaderless, partly to prevent authorities targeting the organisers. One of the few named activists has been Bonnie Leung, a 32-year-old district councillor.

Last month, Leung visited Canberra with a message for Australia’s MPs: she urged them to delay ratifying a free trade deal with Hong …

For many years, former Indonesian general Prabowo Subianto was effectively barred from entering Australia. This was due to his suspected role in mass disappearances, torture, rapes and killings in Jakarta, Timor-Leste and West Papua from the 1970s to the 1990s. In 1998, after being discharged from the military for alleged kidnappings, he entered …

For the past two years, Australia has been urgently trying to improve ties with its Pacific neighbours to prevent China from gaining a military foothold in the region. But as China’s pockets grow deeper, this task is proving increasingly difficult – as highlighted by the recent revelation that an entire Pacific island could soon come under Chinese …

Last weekend, in response to Peter Dutton’s criticism of Chinese Communist Party values, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson accused Australia of a “Cold War mentality”. The spokesperson, Geng Shuang, used the same phrase last year to describe the debate about foreign interference following the publication of Silent Invasion, …

Last Thursday night, Scott Morrison gave this year’s Lowy Institute lecture, which should have been an opportunity to explore significant global changes affecting Australia, such as growing tensions between China and the United States. Instead, Morrison’s speech was confused, paranoid and strangely contradictory. It featured an urgent warning …

Yesterday, China held one of its biggest ever military parades to celebrate seventy years of Communist Party rule. But the showcase of its latest weaponry and growing military power will do little to ease global anxieties about the uses for which that hardware is intended. This is largely because the role that China wants to carve out on the international …

Donald Trump has not been as bad for Australia as for most other countries, but this doesn’t make his presidency less terrible. The US president has backed autocrats, damaged his country’s alliances, reverted to protectionism, abandoned the Paris climate-change deal, and taken aggressive steps on Iran and North Korea that failed because he had …

Yesterday, the flag was brought down for the final time at the Taiwanese embassy in Honiara, Solomon Islands. The Solomon Islands was previously the largest of Taiwan’s Pacific allies, but has decided to switch its allegiances to China, a move that could lead to similar flips by the five allies that remain.

The switch occurred despite Australia’s …

Even by Australian standards, Scott Morrison’s recent commitment of troops to join a United States–led coalition in the Strait of Hormuz seems lukewarm. Morrison plans to send a surveillance aircraft and a frigate to ensure free passage through the narrow strait following threats by Iran. But the aircraft will be deployed for just one month …

Off the tip of north Queensland is a looming problem that Australia has long tried to avoid: a people suppressed. The region of West Papua receives little attention in Australia, partly because Indonesia blocks access to aid groups, foreign media and the United Nations. But Canberra, too, prefers this silence.

In recent weeks, however, the …