| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
182276
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In June 1987, Canada announced that it intended to build 10 to 12 nuclear-powered submarines, based on a French or UK design and fueled with highly enriched uranium (HEU) possibly of Canadian origin. Faced with insurmountable strategic, political, financial, logistical, and nonproliferation obstacles, the idea sank without trace within two years.1 Although the Australian nuclear-powered submarine proposal, announced 34 years later on September 16, is different in several respects, it faces equally strong headwinds that may deliver the same result.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
181936
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In its 50 years, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs (and later Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) has become a great department of state. Foreign is an important conglomerate, doing diplomacy, trade, aid, and spying. In the Canberra system, though, Foreign has an ‘anaemia’ problem caused by chronic underfunding. Measured as a proportion of the Commonwealth budget, spending on diplomacy is halving in only three decades. Anaemia is the effect; the causes are a formidable set of forces pressing against the department over those 50 years: the evolution and empowerment of Australia’s presidential prime minister; the birth of ministerial minders; public service managerialism; Canberra’s national security system—and mindset—in the twenty-first century; globalisation and the digital era: every government department has its own bit of foreign policy; political choices: Australia’s two parties of government— Liberal and Labor—often buy something other than good foreign policy. Plus, important bits of the Liberal Party see DFAT as ideologically tainted.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|