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Keywords: Indonesia

  • CARTOON

    Scott Morrison's war

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 22 January 2014
    4 Comments

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The war on asylum seekers

    • Justin Glyn
    • 22 January 2014
    32 Comments

    The current dispute with Indonesia over border incursions by the Australian Navy is symptomatic of a deeper problem — the militarisation of political discourse. Von Clausewitz famously claimed that 'war is politics by other means': in other words, that military force is employed in service of political ends. In Australia, as elsewhere in the West, this is being taken to an extreme not previously seen outside authoritarian societies.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2013: Australian connections to drowned asylum seekers

    • Marg Hutton
    • 16 January 2014
    5 Comments

    In 2001 Prime Minister Howard tried to distance Australia from the SIEVX tragedy, in which 353 asylum seekers drowned, by repeatedly referring to the sinking as having occurred in 'Indonesian waters'. If there was any doubt then that SIEVX was an Australian tragedy, in 2013 there is none. There are now young kids growing up in Australia, who were born here and speak with Australian accents, who had brothers and sisters who drowned on SIEVX.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Thailand tensions must rouse traumatised Coalition

    • Tony Kevin
    • 04 December 2013
    11 Comments

    We are witnessing a serious opposition-led threat to democratic process and respect for election results in Thailand. Possibly the Abbott Government is so traumatised as a result of its current tensions with Indonesia and China that it won't dare to open its mouth on Thailand. But this is a clear case where Australia should comment as a friend of Thailand and of its democratically elected government.

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  • MEDIA

    Rights and wrongs of ABC spy reports

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 29 November 2013
    14 Comments

    The ABC does not have a special responsibility to be 'diplomatic' in deciding what to report and what not to report. It does not have an obligation to adjust its news judgments to implicitly support government policies, or to weigh up what the majority of the public might think to do in such a situation. It must only exercise its professional judgment as to 'news value', and be accountable for it.

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  • CARTOON

    Coalition kitchen

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 27 November 2013
    3 Comments

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Abbott should not punish the ABC

    • Michael Mullins
    • 25 November 2013
    14 Comments

    The prime minister said he 'sincerely regrets any embarrassment that recent media reports have caused' Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Did he mean the media was doing its job and that the embarrassment was collateral damage? Or was he regretting that the media was out of line? Outspoken monarchist Professor David Flint says the government should retaliate against the ABC by reviewing the its overseas broadcasting contract.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Spies like us

    • Bill Calcutt
    • 25 November 2013
    6 Comments

    The recent observation by a close Asian ally that 'spying on friends is amoral' belies an apparently growing gap between the illusion of civility and honesty and the reality of our suspicious relations with 'foreigners'. While the justification for the development of ubiquitous electronic surveillance capabilities is counter-terrorism, the greatest beneficiaries may be private business interests gaining a competitive advantage in a global free market.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The ethics of spying

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 November 2013
    12 Comments

    A minor diversion in the disruption of Australia's relations with Indonesia has been the entanglement of political commentators. Many have wriggled on the hook of their conviction that international relations are an ethics free zone in which the only guiding star is national self interest. But that does not stop them from launching a raft of ethical judgments. It is worth considering on what ethical principles international and national politics might rest.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Abbott's spy games

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 November 2013
    36 Comments

    Tony Abbott's reply in Parliament to Adam Bandt may have seemed a balanced, well-crafted answer but it was way too clever. Indonesian anger against Australia continues to grow. These events will harden already strong views in Jakarta of Australia as a false friend to Indonesia, as a nation whose only true affinities are with its four fellow members of the five-power Anglo-Saxon club.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mishandling Indonesia

    • Tony Kevin
    • 13 November 2013
    6 Comments

    Labor has made a political meal of last week's mishandled asylum seeker rescue. But neither Bill Shorten nor Richard Marles has shown any sympathy for the asylum seekers themselves. Meanwhile the Coalition's stubbornness has set back relations with Indonesia, has it pressed ahead with its turn-back policy to the point where Indonesia had to say very publicly 'We will not tolerate this any longer.'

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Confessions of a fat, exploitative tourist

    • Ellena Savage
    • 25 October 2013
    5 Comments

    One person told me the story of going out to a gallery in a rural area and seeing the same man harvesting rice with a buffalo that they'd seen a few months earlier. When they asked the gallery owner if it was harvest time again, he was told that the man was not actually harvesting rice, he was just employed to look like he was. A spectacle for the tourists. Which I'm pretty sure is the most alienated labour possible.

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