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After five years and 300,000 words, this is my final Canberra Column. Is that a mountain of punditry or just a maze? A quick wade through the wordage leaves little doubt about the recurrent theme that runs through the five years: this was the era of Kevinism. As Prime Minister, The Kevin was his own über foreign minister. Then, as PM-in-exile, he was foreign minister.

In light of Michael Danby MP's intervention in the debate over last month's UN vote on the status of Palestine, it's worth taking another look at Graeme Dobell's excellent column from last Thursday, When a Foreign Minister Rolls the PM. An extract: ...how do we rate Bob Carr's rout of Gillard last week over Australia's vote in the UN on the status of Palestine? Carr's standing and perceptions about his throw weight have been enhanced.

One bit of the Asian Century that has already arrived in Canberra is the way the Prime Minister keeps flying off to meet Asian leaders. Over a three month period, Julia Gillard has done Asia Pacific duty at APEC in Vladivostok, attended the Asia-Europe summit in Vientiane, and co-chaired the Bali Democracy Forum with the presidents of Indonesia and South Korea.

I thought Graeme Dobell's column on the Asian Century White Paper last week was a real cracker. I found this passage particularly reassuring: Malcolm Cook remarks on the limited coverage by the tabloids. The tabloids are, indeed, important attack dogs because of their finely tuned populist noses. The idea of teaching Asian languages to every Australian kid did not, apparently, look like red meat to the redtops.

Taste the Asian Century White Paper from the perspectives of process and politics. The machinery stuff (the process) is always interesting in Canberra, and usually revealing. If this had been the Henry Review instead of a White Paper it would have been bigger, bolder, broader, and almost certainly more adventurous.

In its quest for a UN Security Council Seat, to be decided by the General Assembly on Thursday, Australia has kept running into Israel and Palestine.  The race for the seat has been with Luxembourg and Finland, but Israel and Palestine have become a fascinating element of the contest for the two seats allocated to the Western European and Others Group in which Australia finds itself anachronistically located.

Graeme Dobell's series on Bob Carr's first six months as foreign minister: Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5. In the never-ending foreign policy struggle to identify means and ends, to balance commitments with power, personal style doesn't always get the attention it should in explaining how things get done – or fall in a heap. Yet in relations between nations, there are only three big levers to pull or wield: cash, guns or cuddles.

A continuing look at the work of Australia's Foreign Minister. If you missed the start of this series here are links to parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. One area where Bob Carr's role as the non-Rudd has proved invaluable for the Gillard Government is in the handling of the aid budget.  As prime minister and foreign minister, Rudd presided over an unprecedented surge in Australia's aid budget. Carr is to preside over the cresting of the surge.

We know that things are crook between the Defence Department and the Gillard Government at present, as Graeme Dobell has explained in some detail.

Part 1 and part 2 of Graeme Dobell's series on Bob Carr's first six months as foreign minister. As Bob Carr prepared to ascend to his dream job, he consulted Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Dennis Richardson on the vistas and the visions about to open up. The travel schedule the Secretary outlined was embraced as a glorious gift. In just over two years in the job, the just beheaded foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, had gone to nearly 60 countries in 27 international trips.

Six months ago on 13 March, Bob Carr was sworn in as senator and foreign minister in one of the quickest personal transformations Canberra has seen for many a day.  In less than a fortnight, Citizen Carr went from carefree commentator to cabinet. The man Mark Latham dubbed Bob the Blogger was happily chatting away on the web, following his Thoughtlines, seven years gone from politics, when a convulsion surged through Canberra and the dream job opened up. Step forward Senator Bob, sayeth the Prim

Alison Broinowski writes: There are a few other factors that may count against Australia's bid for election to the UN Security Council that Thom Woodroofe and Graeme Dobell don't mention in this otherwise comprehensive list.

Australian diplomacy is about to get the result of a significant test. To cut straight to the race, Australia is about to find out whether it can beat Luxembourg. Or to be a bit more stuffy, Australia is going to discover what it's worth to be a founding member of the UN and the twelfth largest contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets. Next month, the 193 members of the UN will vote to fill two seats allocated to the Western European and Others Group on the Security Council.

In seeking fresh engagement with Fiji, the aim of Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the Pacific Islands Forum is to push for the best achievable political bargain between Fiji's people and the Bainimarama New Order regime.  That means outsiders will have to eat a bit of crow, as the previous column described, while understanding that the New Order will deliver less democracy than it promises.

Part 1 of this article is here and part 2 is here.  Consider a single political-diplomatic start date for the idea of the Asian Century. It is 1988 and Deng Xiaoping is meeting Rajiv Gandhi. China's leader tells India's Prime Minister: 'The 21st century can only be the Asian Century if India and China combine to make it so.' It's a powerful vision.

Matching the message to the audience is one of the defining choices in any attempt at communication. The problem for the White Paper on the Asian Century is the myriad of messages and the multiplicity of audiences — in Australia and beyond. Ken Henry is near the finish in his grapple with the audience-message mix.

There has been so much media coverage of the speech the Lowy Institute hosted last week by Australia's so-called top spy, it would be an intelligence failure of the highest order if you had somehow missed the story. In any case, the full recording of the speech by Nick Warner, Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, is now on the Lowy Institute website. For an analysis of what it all means, take a look at the interview with seasoned Canberra journalist and Lowy Institute

After a 60-year wait, the first public speech by Australia's top spy was notable just for happening, as well as being illuminating and tantalising. To rework Samuel Johnson: 'Sir, a spy chief preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs.

To round off Graeme Dobell's piece about Tony Abbott's foreign and aid policies as described in the leaked Coalition speaker notes, let's take a look at the speech Abbott gave at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC on Tuesday.   First, it's important to say that a speech should be judged mainly in the delivery, and I have not seen or heard this speech delivered.

My previous column took the Coalition's leaked speaking notes for MPs as a de facto policy platform and looked at what an Abbott Government would do about defence. Using the same document, let's look at the Coalition's stance on international affairs. As to be expected from any Opposition, the Coalition refrain is the need to repair and refocus relations with just about everybody: the US and Japan are the first two on the list, followed by China, India and Indonesia.

A former Defence Minister has taken a giant swipe at the culture and leadership habits of Australia's military. Joel Fitzgibbon says it is time to put a civilian in charge, sitting above the Chief of the Australian Defence Force 'to establish what Defence sadly lacks today; one final point of accountability.' In four decades writing about the military, I'd rate this as the strongest attack by a minister on the workings of the military half of the so-called diarchy. Fitzgibbon accuses the office

Not long after arriving in Sydney, I ran into a young Australian architect who outlined what seemed like an astonishingly heretical theory: that the best way to improve the quality of local architecture was to demolish the Sydney Opera House. Jorn Utzon's unfinished masterpiece, he reckoned, had a paralysing effect on local design.

A key submission to the Asian Century inquiry – perhaps a foundational text – is a work that is fast nearing its 50th birthday. In contemplating the grand task of an Asian future for Australia, Ken Henry would well understand the many layers of thought in Donald Horne's The Lucky Country, a dissection of Australia's regional fate that still resonates for its verve and insight – and the quality of its word-smithing. Consider one of the most famous paragraphs ever penned by an intellectual provin

Trade and economic interests are not always definitive, but they have obvious weight and, most importantly, they influence the hierarchy and slow re-ordering of national preferences. The shift of economic weight has cumulative effects on preferences which feed into judgments about national interest. What were once easy options can become unthinkable or at least look narrow and outdated because of these cumulative changes.