Hamish McDonald - Australia's uneasy neighbourhood

Hosted by: Australian Institute of International Affairs, NSW

The event will start on: Tuesday, 14 September 2010 6:00 PM

And will end on: Tuesday, 14 September 2010 7:30 PM

At The Glover Cottages, Sydney

124 Kent Street , Sydney NSW

02 8011 4728     nsw.branch@aiia.asn.au

Posted by: nsw   

To Australia's north lies what has often been referred to as an 'arc of uncertainty'.

Yet foreign affairs did not figured in Australia's election campaign, aside from the boat-people issue. Apart from the huge shifts in economic and strategic power happening in Asia, the coming couple of decades will see far-reaching change in Australia's arc of near-neighbours which we won't be able to ignore.

There is the return to elected government in Fiji promised for 2014  by the Suva military regime. In the five years after that, the people of French-ruled New Caledonia will vote on whether to become the independent nation of Kanaky, and those of Bougainville island on whether to separate from Papua New Guinea. There is continuing unrest among the indigenous people in Indonesian-ruled Papua. Underlying this are demographic pressures. In East Timor, recent reports show that China is establishing a significant presence.

All these small and fragile states are seeing an urban drift and a build-up of volatile squatter settlements in their cities, sources of political instability and a transfer of peoples from healthy lives of village subsistence into urban poverty.

The Asia-Pacific editor of the Sydney Morning Herald follows this region closely.

Come and meet Hamish McDonald.

Hamish Mc Donald is Asia-Pacific Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He has been a foreign correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing and New Delhi, where he was bureau chief of the Far Eastern EconomicReview

He has twice won Walkley awards, and has had a report on Burma read into the record of the US Congress. He is the author of books on Indonesia and India, and was made an inaugural Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 2008.