Asia and Pacific

Back in February I looked at social media activism in the Pacific and asked \'What\'s next?\'. Well, now we know. When TIME Magazine made \'The Protester\' its 2011 Person of the Year, few could imagine that months later, a little-known Pacific Island wedged between Australia and

Scott Flower is a McKenzie Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is regularly engaged by multinational companies as a risk management consultant to major resource projects in PNG. Over the last month, rarely a day has passed without some drama in Papua New Guinea\'s political landscape.

There are indeed good reasons for asking, as James did yesterday in reply to my piece, how the Angkor Archaeological Park (above) spends the entrance fees it charges foreign visitors. Eric Campbell\'s investigation of this issue for ABC TV raised many still-unanswered

It\'s unusual enough to have a single item about Cambodia in the Australian media, and yesterday there were two. First, an allegation that one of Prime Minister Hun\'s nephews is linked to drug trafficking and money laundering (the man in question has issued a denial). And, secondly, the

Dr Daniel Woker, former Swiss Ambassador to Australia (2008-12), writes: Malcolm Cook\'s \'five sound principles...prominent in Rudd\'s approach to the Asia Pacific\' are spot-on. But, the fifth as formulated is way too modest and defensive. Australia is not just a \'non-major power

This morning one of the region\'s foremost experts on China\'s military, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies Senior Fellow Richard Bitzinger, dropped by the Lowy Institute to meet with some of our experts. He was kind enough to give me a few minutes for an interview, and we began by

Ed. note: This post follows on from Fergus Hanson\'s assessment of Rudd\'s China legacy. \'Good principles, mixed execution\' summarises Kevin Rudd\'s approach to the Asia Pacific region, and Australia\'s place within it, during his tenure as prime minister and then foreign minister. \'So far

Today the Lowy Institute launches what I think is one of the most compelling and challenging polls we\'ve ever conducted. It was a survey carried out across Indonesia following up on a poll we did there in 2006. The changes the poll records are remarkable, and responses to a series of new questions

Jim Della-Giacoma is South East Asia Project Director for the International Crisis Group, based in Jakarta. The photo in this post, of The Nay Pyi Taw copy of the Shwedagon temple, is by the author. In some parts of the world, the secret ballot is still known as the Australian ballot. It was

Everything was very friendly today in the joint press conference between Australia\'s and Indonesia\'s foreign and defence ministers in Canberra. This was a chance for new Foreign Minister Bob Carr to meet his counterpart Marty Natalegawa, and Carr held his phone aloft to reporters to show that

PNG is once again going through a governance-sapping exercise of self-interested politics. Since February last year, when then Prime Minister Somare was suspended from office for two weeks following a decision by the country's Leadership Tribunal, Papua New Guineans have witnessed an increasingly

The Australia-US alliance is at the forefront in any discussion by Australian policy-makers and specialists about regional security issues. The announcement during President Barack Obama\'s visit to Australia in November 2011 of an agreement to rotate US Marines in and out of Darwin was viewed by

The Fiji Government has a history of making poor decisions whenever there appeared to be a slight willingness in Australia or New Zealand to re-assess approaches to Fiji. The deportation of diplomats or Fiji Times publishers at inopportune moments made it impossible for foreign ministers in

Over the past year or so, the success of the Indonesian economy has been applauded by foreign commentators and business-people (and, belatedly, by the credit rating agencies). Foreign investment has doubled over the past couple of years and Vice-President Boediono has a good story to tell. But it\'s

Excellent piece here from the ABC\'s Sean Dorney summarising the political situation in PNG, including interviews with the major players and some dramatic footage from parliament. It\'s also worth noting here a piece that our Melanesia expert Jenny Hayward-Jones tweeted the other day

Journalists the world over have turned these past few years to WikiLeaks and its Australian founder, Julian Assange, to shine a light on the murky, inner workings of government. In Canberra these past few days, however, all reporters have had to do is put a microphone in front of an Australian

Dr Richard Grant is Executive Director of the Asia:NZ Foundation. He was previously New Zealand\'s Ambassador to Germany and to France, and High Commissioner to the UK and to Singapore. Readers of The Economist of 18 February would have seen the reference to the similar size

The US is hastening out of two wars and rethinking its defence interests in Asia, while Australia realigns the alliance and moves more military might to the north and west of the continent. With all that in flux, two ex-Defence Secretaries, Ric Smith and Allan Hawke, are well placed to produce one

Gordon Peake is a Visiting Fellow at the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program, ANU. He is writing a book entitled \'Beloved Land: Stories from Timor-Leste\'. Maternus Bere remembers well when he was forgiven for being a pro-Indonesian Timorese militia leader. The trial did not

Gordon Peake is a Visiting Fellow at the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program, ANU. He is writing a book entitled \'Beloved Land: Stories from Timor-Leste\'. Domingos Soares (pictured) is a spry 93 year-old from the district of Viqueque on East Timor\'s southern coast who says he

On the top tier of Defence Department reports, where White Papers reside, there are also a few reviews that reshape the way Defence thinks, plans and builds. Defence does reviews by the dozens. Those that rise to the level of lasting blueprint are rare. The canny pair of warhorses, Ric Smith and

I\'m sympathetic to the distinction Michael Beckley raises between GDP and GDP per capita in his post on defining decline; it\'s a point I also focused on in my original post. Each gives us different readings about national capabilities. But the other question I raised concerned comparisons over

The use of the \'tilt-shift\' technique in video and photography, which makes real scenes look like elaborate miniatures, has become so ubiquitous online that it is fast losing its power to delight. Yet this short video about Beijing exploits the technique well,