• Malcolm Cook found this interesting Thai perspective on the politics of expanding the East Asia Summit.
• Taiwan’s South China Sea choice. 
• Michael Fullilove takes a look at what an Australian Coalition foreign policy might look like.
• A Japanese government panel to recommend relaxing 'longstanding defense guidelines to prepare for "contingencies" in the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan Strait'.
• The latest on China's aid plans in Vanuatu.

Peter Hartcher today asks Prime Minister Julia Gillard to explain her population pitch for Australia with the headline: 'No numbers, no substance, no solutions'. While the Australian reports concerns about any shift away from a big Australia.

The Lowy Institute conducted polling on this issue back in March and the numbers suggest why it has been so difficult to get down to specifics.

While a majority of Australians (69%) wanted Australia's population to be smaller than the 36 million projected in the government's Intergenerational Report, at the same time 72% wanted it to bigger than the current size.

Breaking those numbers down, 43% said 'the best target population for Australia' was '30 million people', 23% said it was '40 million people' and 6% said it was '50 million people or more'. Just over one fifth (22%) said it should be 'around the current size of 22 million people' and only 4% said it should be 'less than the current size of 22 million people'. 

For a politician hoping to please everyone, it seems there is no number everyone can agree on.  

Photo by Flickr user alexkess, used under a Creative Commons license.

One of the more intriguing presentations at our recent Myer Melanesia MDG conference was that by Dennis Whittle, CEO of Global Giving. It's an innovative attempt to democratise the selection of aid projects and the delivery of funds. A bit like Kiva.  

I had the chance to speak with Dennis after his presentation about Global Giving.

• The Lowy Institute has been following the expansion of China's aid program in the Pacific for some time, while the Economist asked back in 2003 whether China needed any more aid when it was launching men into space. Now the UK has said it can't justify aid to either China or Russia.
• The latest NYT/CBS poll found most Americans 'expect alternative forms to replace oil as a major source within 25 years. Yet a majority are unwilling to pay higher gasoline prices to help develop new fuel sources.' It's a finding similar to that in the 2008 and 2010 Lowy polls: a lot of people want action on climate change but are not prepared to pay much to make it happen.
• General Stanley McChrystal goes out on a limb in an interview with Rolling Stone. Passport asks if he can survive.
• Gordon Chang partly agrees with Mark Thirlwell's reading of China's latest movements on its currency peg. As Mark foreshadowed it now looks like it won't be front and centre on the G20 agenda.

One of the speakers I particularly enjoyed hearing from at the Myer Melanesia MDG conference was David Roodman from the Center for Global Development (his blog here).

The first interview I did with him follows a presentation he did on some of the fascinating micro finance innovations currently taking place in Kenya — predominantly through the very impressive M-Pesa. (The Economist also looked at these recently.)

The second interview covered the Commitment to Development Index, which David was involved in setting up. The CDI has a pretty handy website too.

Last week the Myer Melanesia Program hosted a two day conference in Sydney on the MDGs. There were a number of impressive speakers and a some interesting ideas to come out of the various sessions.

Below is my interview with Professor Peter Singer (you have to excuse the background noise of busy conference goers) in which we discuss his ideas about giving.

Yesterday, Wednesday Lowy Lunch subscribers were treated to an insightful look at the recent turmoil in Thailand by Dr Milton Osborne, who is only recently back from a trip there.

I spoke to him afterwards about the significance of the unrest and the divisions within Thai society, the role of the King and the future for democracy. You can listen to his full presentation here.

Photo by Flickr user Karsoe, used under a Creative Commons license.

In the wake of the British election, there has been a lot of discussion about the representativeness of the UK's electoral system.

But a friend in Moscow alerted me to the fact that things could be much worse — take Russia, for example. 

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is in New Zealand today for a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum Ministerial Contact Group to discuss Fiji.

He might be interested in this result from the 2010 Lowy Poll, released today:

The 2010 Lowy Institute Poll was released today. It's the sixth annual poll tracking Australian attitudes towards the world.

Poll results can be interpreted in various ways. In a seminal book on polling, Walter Lippmann argued public opinion dealt with 'indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts and there is nothing obvious about them'.

Here's my attempt at interpreting the results of our latest poll.

First of all, Australians love New Zealand. Every year we ask Australians to rank their feelings towards different countries and in no year has any country received a higher score than New Zealand did this year. Canada managed second place followed by France, Singapore, the US and Japan. North Korea continues to suffer from an image problem and ranked last.

Australians might know who they like, but are divided about where they fit in the world. One third (32%) said Australia was more a part of Asia, one third (31%) said we were part of the Pacific, and the other third (31%) that we were not really part of any region.

Interestingly, there was a difference among the generations. Younger Australians (18-29 years old) were most likely to say Australia was not really part of any region (46%) compared with just 15% who said it was more a part of Asia. Those 60 years or older said the opposite: 42% said Australia was more a part of Asia and just 15% that it was not really part of any region.

One of the results I found most interesting this year was on the world's leading economic power.

Eminent Australian historian James Curran delivered an impressive Wednesday Lowy Lunch speech yesterday on Australia's efforts to remodel its national image in the wake of the movement away from the mother country. 

I caught him for five minutes afterwards to discuss when exactly Australia separated from the UK (don't hold your breath for a precise date), how Australia's view of itself changed and James' intriguing anecdote about efforts by the Secretary of Foreign Affairs to introduce a uniform for diplomats.

You can listen to his full speech here.

I am joining Jim Molan in highly recommending Craig Jurisevic's new book, Blood On My Hands. I finished it last week and managed to catch his compelling talk on Saturday.

At almost every turn of the page Jurisevic smacks up against impossible choices and ends up pushing firmly against what many would consider the limits of moral and ethical boundaries — and not just medical ones. The reader is given a first-hand account of his actions and their consequences, which end up presenting a compelling case for what he does.

What sets Jurisevic's book apart from others in this genre is that he decides to act. In many other first-hand accounts of humanitarian tragedies, like those in Rwanda or Srebrenica, the foreign author is placed in a position where the rules prevent them from acting.

They do their best to fight against the rules, but ultimately they stand down. But you are left with a strong impression that they still wonder what would have happened if they had disobeyed and acted on their instincts.

Jurisevic is held back by a number of factors — including a young child and new wife back in Australia — let alone likely opprobrium from the Australian Medical Association.

His story is really about the consequences of taking that risk. By no means is every decision is a winner: his actions result in some people dying and very nearly himself. Yet he is operating in a world — more specifically a cave on the front line — that is a long way from ideals and laboratory conditions.

This book will make you think.

In his budget reply, Opposition leader Tony Abbott promised, if the Coalition is elected, to freeze recruitment for two years in most areas of the public service, including DFAT. But what does this mean in practice?

DFAT has provided numbers on its natural attrition rate over the last five years, which are as follows: 86 (2009), 140 (2008), 116 (2007), 107 (2006) and 109 (2005). That's an average of 112 staff lost per year — or 224 over the two-year period Abbott is proposing.  

This freeze would equate to a reduction of 10 per cent compared with DFAT's staffing levels reported in the 2008-09 annual report. This, when the foreign service is already suffering from a major resource deficit. Or as the current Secretary put it:

...between 1996 and 2008 the Australian Public Service grew in general by between 25 and 30 per cent. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade shrank by 11 per cent. By 2008 there were 100 fewer people overseas working for the Australian Government in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade than what there had been 15 years before.

When Mr Abbott gave his first major address on foreign policy as Opposition leader he said:

As the leader of the party, obviously it is my challenge to rise to areas of expertise and understanding that haven't been my forte in the past. It's always an interesting challenge.

If the Coalition is elected later this year, there might be even fewer people around to help him understand Australian foreign policy.

Back in November 2008 I wrote about the short-listing of several Australian judges to sit on two new UN internal dispute tribunals, which were set up to replace the shambolic former system. I was a little sceptical the new structures would succeed:

...one of the biggest obstacles to justice in the past was the significant financial implications of compensating so many staff who had been so poorly managed/abused for so long. States, it seemed, were reluctant to cough up for UN managerial incompetence.  

A report in the Sydney Morning Herald today suggests NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Adams, who was appointed to one of the new bodies, has found the new UN justice regime something like the old one — and at least as frustrating.

Justice Adams has accused the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, of 'wilful disobedience' and barred Mr Ban's lawyers from speaking in court until they comply with an order to produce internal documents related to a case. As he put it in an 8 March ruling:

In my review the refusal constituted an attack on the rule of law embodied in the statute of the tribunal.

It's nice to see someone prepared to hit back at a system in desperate need of some reform, but I don't know I would back him against the UN bureaucracy.

Photo by Flickr user lambdachialpha, used under a Creative Commons license.

The Lowy Institute has conducted polls every year since 2005. Most of our polling is done by phone — although we have used face-to-face interviews in Indonesia. Many fieldwork companies are now also offering internet polling — although it seems even this innovation in polling could soon be leapfrogged.

Carnegie Mellon has analysed over a billion tweets to see if they can be used to measure presidential approval and consumer confidence (by comparing them to regular polls). For a first attempt the results weren't bad:

...both the Twitter-derived sentiments and the traditional polls reflected declining approval of President Obama's job performance during 2009, with a 72 percent correlation between them.

Thanks to reader David for the tip-off.

Photo by Flickr user wicho, used under a Creative Commons license.

Paul Cotton writes in with this reply to Graeme Dobell's recent post.

A point you overlooked in your excellent and interesting article.

In a few days or weeks Kim Beazley will have as his fellow Ambassador in Washington none other than Mike Moore, whether he likes it or not.

• Michael Green in the WSJ says don't go wobbly on North Korea (subscribers only).
• Michael Fullilove takes you on a more personal tour of Washington in this Spectator piece. Rory Medcalf gives you a more personal look at India in this one. 
• From the NYT, the fraying seams in the fight against AIDS:

Of the 33 million people infected, 14 million are immuno-compromised enough to need drugs now, under the latest World Health Organization guidelines. (W.H.O. guidelines are conservative; if all 33 million were Americans, most clinicians would treat them at once.)

Instead, despite a superhuman effort by donors, fewer than four million are on treatment. Just to meet the minimal W.H.O. guidelines, donations would have to treble instead of going flat.

• Caroline Baum at Bloomberg disses the Greek contagion theory sweeping Europe. 
• Four reasons from Foreign Policy why the UK hung parliament is a bad thing, two reasons why it's good, and a truly bizarre one from Youtube to show it's gone on too long already ...

• Sam was sceptical of the new missile system Iran recently unveiled at a parade, but this analysis suggests it might be a bit more than some oil drums welded together and thrown on the back of a truck. 
• Social experiments to end poverty?
• Iran hosts a nuclear dinner party.
• Your UN Security Council bid moment of Zen: 'Australia very much wants to enhance its engagement with countries of the Caribbean...' said Foreign Minister Stephen Smith after becoming the first Australian Foreign Minister to visit Dominica.
• Drezner explains why the US dollar will remain number one: facebook.

Last week Dick Smith wrote under the headline, 'The people have spoken, halt population growth':

For the past three months I’ve been traveling all over the country talking to people about plans to rapidly increase our population. Nine out of 10 people I talk to oppose the idea.

Others read the mood in a similar way. Before opinion polls were widely used, President Roosevelt apparently used to dip his arm into a barrel of letters and choose one at random in an effort to try and gauge public sentiment.

And that is the problem with the less rigorous ways of guessing what the public in general want — it's pretty hard to get right. It's in these knowledge gaps that polling can serve a useful function. In March, the Lowy Institute asked a nationally representative sample of 1,001 Australians what they thought was the best population size for Australia by 2050:

• Almost three quarters (72%) of Australians supported a bigger Australia. But 69% preferred a population smaller than the 36 million predicted in the government’s Intergenerational Report. 
• Forty-three percent of Australians said the best population size for Australia in 2050 was 30 million; 23% chose 40 million, and 6% chose 50 million people or more.
• Twenty-two per cent were happy with the current level and only 4% wanted a smaller population than Australia has now.

Photo by Flickr user Christopher Chan, used under a Creative Commons license.

John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute, gave the Wednesday Lowy Lunch this week. He was surprisingly upbeat about the outcome at Copenhagen, and in his interview with me afterwards, I asked him why.

I also asked if the UNFCC was still the right mechanism for reaching a global deal to reduce carbon emissions, what role China played at the talks and what was needed to rebuild trust domestically and internationally to move forward.

John Connor's full presentation can be downloaded from the Lowy Institute website.

The High Court has opened up the prospect of Australia's first successful extradition of an accused war criminal after quashing an earlier ruling from the Federal Court.

That should let the Australian Federal Police off the hook. A reply to a Senate question released in February revealed the AFP has never conducted an investigation into the accused war criminal — even after The Australian newspaper revealed he was living in Perth (and prior to Croatia requesting his extradition).

Incidentally, this reply to a question on notice tabled late last year shows that staffing levels in the war crimes screening unit have more than halved since February 2008 (from 11 to five full-time equivalent staff), at a time when other countries around the world are ramping up their preventative measures. Interesting tactic. 

Photo by Flickr user Jirrupin, used under a Creative Commons license.

During the recent visit of the Indonesian President to Australia there was much official rhetoric about the strong links between the two countries, though I noted at the time that Australia's investment in Indonesia accounted for just 0.38% of Australia's total stock of investment abroad. This was optimistically framed by DFAT as Indonesia representing Australia's '18th largest investment destination'.

Figures were just released putting the economic relationship into further context — Australia's investment in Indonesia represents just 0.7% of total FDI in Indonesia. That excludes some types of investment, but you get the picture.   

I liked this extract from Rowan Callick's piece in Monday's Australian:

Because of past prejudices, Australians have become used to viewing ourselves as the courted party in this relationship. But we must begin getting used to the reality that as the smaller nation, we have to make the running.

It struck me as a pretty good point to make about the relationship. I attended a business forum that the Indonesian President addressed last week. Australia's Trade Minister Simon Crean gave the introduction.

It was well meaning enough, but it seemed a little odd to hear him point out to the President — who has a PhD in agricultural economics — that micro economic reform was important. He attributed these reforms to Australia's success surviving the GFC (0.7% year on year GDP growth in 2009). Indonesia managed to get by with 4.0%.

Ahead of President Obama's visit to Australia, The Onion asks, 'has Obama become too big?'

Here are two reader replies to my post on travel advisories to Indonesia. First Trevor Harrison from Asian Strategies writes:

The largest impact of the travel advisory is in the corporate area, on those companies and organisations that require their executives be insured for travel. Some insurance companies will not issue policies under the current advisory, and this has restricted Indonesia in its marketing to the MICE [Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions] industry in Australia.

The meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions market is the most profitable area of tourism, and one that Jakarta and Bali are particularly well set up to handle. It can also effect business. I know of one instance where a large research program sponsored by a group of Australian universities was conducted in all major Asian countries except Indonesia, because university policies would not allow research executives to travel without insurance coverage...Indonesia missed out.

Another reader from Jakarta comments:

• North Korea has 'created an army division in charge of newly developed intermediate-range missiles capable of striking U.S. forces in Japan and Guam'.
• Hungry Beast examines a Defence Department payroll 'anomaly' for deployed soldiers. Fixing it is reportedly running into political problems.
• Updating our previous links on extremists in Aceh, Indonesian police have confirmed the link between their Jakarta raid and counter-terrorism operations in Aceh.
• Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen has responded to Sam’s post on the Joint Strike Fighter. Sam will have more on this issue next week.

Australia's travel advisories always raise a few questions. They have been a particular irritant in the relationship with Indonesia, but the impact they have is curious.

The first line of the current travel advice to Indonesia reads:

We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to Indonesia, including Bali, at this time due to the very high threat of terrorist attack.

And what impact does that have on travel to Indonesia?  

read more

Whatever diplomatic niceties accompany the visit to Australia this week of Indonesia's president, both sides will be keenly aware the bilateral relationship is not as strong as it should be. Lowy Polling shows Australians don't have particularly warm feelings towards Indonesia, and Indonesians feel the same way about Australia.

Economically, it's as if Indonesia is on the other side of the globe — we do almost twice as much trade with New Zealand, which has less than 2% of the population and an economy about one-fifth the size of Indonesia's.

Both sides might point out that at least government-level linkages are in a good state. To an extent this is true — both governments do cooperate on a wide front and have regular exchanges — but just a few examples reveal it's not all that peachy. This is the third sentence from DFAT's Indonesia country brief:

Australia and Indonesia cooperate in practical ways on a wide range of international issues, including counter-terrorism, illegal fishing, people smuggling, avian influenza, climate change and interfaith dialogue.  

These may be valuable areas of cooperation, but they are also quite negative areas to highlight. Each of them focuses on threats to Australia (as well as Indonesia).

Another example is a speech by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith billed as 'Australia's vision for the future of the Australia-Indonesia partnership'. The headings that followed 'The current bilateral relationship' were: 'security cooperation', 'regional disaster response' and 'Indonesia's development challenges'. And this was delivered to an Indonesian audience.  

Steven Colbert called it early. The Cold War is back — at least at the Winter Olympics in Canada. Now the New York Times is reporting:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, angered over his country’s disappointing performance at the Winter Games, began calling for athletic officials’ heads.

“Those who are responsible for training for the Olympics must take responsibility,” Mr. Medaled, who canceled his scheduled trip to the closing ceremonies, said in Moscow on Monday. “They must have the courage to submit their resignation,” he said. “And if they do not have this resolve, we will help them.”

On Monday Senator Wong tabled some fascinating answers to a series of questions on notice from Senator Ludlam concerning Australia's approach to war crimes (see p.110 of this Senate Hansard, made available online this morning). Just incidentally, the questions were asked on 30 September 2009 — so at 146 days for a reply that's slightly over the 30-day rule.

A number of Senator Ludlam's questions are dodged, but there are some interesting insights into the gaps in Australia's war crimes policy. The most interesting replies concerned:

• Gaps in our war crimes legislation: the answer to question four confirms the obvious enough fact that the AFP only investigates 'potential war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide where there is jurisdiction' but goes on to note there were serious gaps in Australia's jurisdiction before comprehensive legislation was implemented in 2002. For war crimes committed in non-international armed conflicts before this date — like the devastating Rwandan genocide — the only legislation referred to in the response is the Crimes (Torture) Act which criminalises torture committed after February 1989 and the Crimes (Hostages) Act which criminalises hostage-taking after June 1990.