Aid & Development

Much of the discussion about climate change policy in Australia has focused on the changes needed by the new Albanese Labor government to align Australia with international goals such as those discussed in Glasgow in November last year. The focus on domestic issues is understandable but the approach

With cruel symbolism, last month a UN conference focused on water challenges concluded in Jakarta just as floods deluged parts of South Asia and India’s capital New Delhi suffered water shortages during a heatwave. But the problem of water faced in the Asia-Pacific is not only about disasters but

During the Australian election campaign, Labor pledged $470 million aid to Southeast Asia over four years, marking it as an attempt to re-engage the region. Labor also promised to appoint a high-level roving envoy to Southeast Asia. Now that Labor is in power, these promises are set to become policy

Australia’s election campaign has been consumed by the Solomon-China security pact in recent days. Labor has cried “Pacific stuff up”, mocking the Coalition government’s Pacific Step-up policy to strengthen neighbourhood ties. In turn, the Coalition has seized on past comments about foreign

The declaration of a national emergency in response to unprecedented flooding in eastern Australia, and the deployment of 7,000 Australian Defence Force troops across the states of New South Wales and Queensland, has reignited debate in the community about how Australia should best respond to more

Hey big spender The first loans under the Morrison government’s new program to support the production of critical minerals provides another insight into just how central the relatively low-profile Export Finance Australia has become to dealing with Chinese economic influence. Trade Minister Dan

Last week, Western officials held closed-door discussions with a Taliban delegation hosted by Norway in Oslo, making clear that humanitarian aid to Afghanistan would be conditional on an improvement in human rights in the war-torn country. The need for assistance is urgent, with the United

While Australia reopens to the world, its Pacific neighbours continue to face the dire consequences of the pandemic. Despite a guaranteed flow of vaccines thanks in large part to Australia, widespread coverage for some Pacific nations is far from reach. Early in the crisis, Pacific countries were

There is a strategic mismatch between Australia’s increasing profile on the global stage and its stagnant aid program. Australia’s position in global politics has never been more prominent. The AUKUS partnership – a landmark security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and

Sovereign nation It is 18 months since Prime Minister Scott Morrison sent Australians off to their first locked-down Easter with the somewhat mixed message that the government needed to “look carefully at our domestic economic sovereignty”. From fixing the toilet roll crisis to a world-

The Australian government’s decision to finance Telstra’s takeover of the Pacific’s biggest telecommunications provider, Digicel, via a $1.33 billion loan from Export Finance Australia, is the clearest indication yet that competing with China is changing government-firm relations in Australia

In the middle of this pandemic, every vaccine is precious. Australia should give its spare locally-made AstraZeneca vaccines to friends in Indonesia. Indonesia has a vacuum of need for vaccines that is predominantly being filled by China, and yet Australia happens to have millions of spare doses

Papua New Guinea’s informal economy is a sleeping giant with massive potential. This untapped sector can be an engine for broad based growth right across the country. Informal economic activities cover legal enterprises that are not registered for taxation and not counted in GDP calculations.

The question of equitable Covid-19 vaccine distribution is likely to be an important topic of discussion at the upcoming G20 Heads of State and Government Summit in Rome during late October. As the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine ranges from US$2–$40, it averages around US$35 to fully vaccinate a

Suitcase intelligence Bob Carr recalls in his Diary of a Foreign Minister how a senior Australian intelligence official told him bluntly in 2013 that the war against the Taliban was failing. “We spent a billion dollars in Uruzgan province … We could have achieved the same result if I had been

Baby BRIs It is now almost three years since Prime Minister Scott Morrison muscled up to China’s infrastructure building Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with $3 billion in varied funding to create an Australian alternative mostly in the Pacific. So, it was notable to see that when the Council of

China’s increasing attention to the Pacific region has created an uncomfortable bind for Australian foreign policy: should Canberra try to compete on economic grounds, knowing that it can’t outspend Beijing, or find another way to differentiate itself? Last week, former Department of Foreign

For decades, humanitarian aid donors have come into the Cook Islands setting the rules. As Secretary General of the Cook Islands Red Cross Society, Fine Tu’itupou-Arnold is well placed to know. “We’re allocated funds by international donors, and then they send over experts to tell us what we

Solomon Islands is littered with unexploded bombs, a legacy of the Second World War as the site of one of the fiercest battles between Japan and the United States in the Pacific. Much of the population across the islands still live with unknown quantities of explosive remains left behind from the

In a virtual meeting with a group of African students in late April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked a question, implicitly, about China: “Are they bringing their own workers with them, or are they giving jobs to people in the country where they’re making investments?” Blinken

The recent floods in Timor-Leste have now caused 45 deaths and some 10,000 people to be displaced, including 7000 in the capital, with widespread damage to roads and bridges, and around 4500 dwellings destroyed. The government has called for international assistance, as a number of local non-

When we look at progress in decentralisation in Papua New Guinea over the last 20 years – the sole continuous and overriding policy priority of successive governments – many challenges remain to improve downstream service delivery. Programming for “social accountability” shifts the focus

For decades, Thailand has served as the primary regional hub for UN agencies and programs, international humanitarian organisations and advocacy groups. In comparison to their neighbors in mainland Southeast Asia, Thai people have enjoyed a relatively open civic environment. Thailand has long been a