Global Outlook

As the G7 prepares to meet in Hiroshima in May 2023, prospects for world order look bleaker than they have been for some time. Northeast Asia is a particular site of tensions. China, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea disagree over regional order, world order, and territorial issues. Military expenditure is rising rapidly and North Korea is consolidating its status as a nuclear power. The growing US-China rivalry dominates the region.

It was pitched as the “most significant” shift in Australia’s armed forces in decades. And among the headline announcements, climate change was recognised as an issue of national security. But the strategic review of Australia’s military released yesterday doesn’t go a lot further than that when it comes to the climate crisis.

The G7 summit of foreign ministers in Japan in mid-April sought to emphasise the need for a unified China policy. However, the diplomatic pronouncements can only gloss over the internal contradictions, but not eliminate them.

The strategic landscape of the Middle East is changing rapidly, but not in favour of the United States as the traditional powerful actor in the region. Continued adversarial US–Iranian relations and regional Arab states’ growing concerns about Washington’s reliability as an ally have widened the arena for Russia and China to expand their strategic footprints in the region.

As global environmental challenges grow, people and societies are increasingly looking to Indigenous knowledge for solutions. Indigenous knowledge is particularly appealing for addressing climate change because it includes long histories and guidance on how to live with, and as part of, nature. It is also based on a holistic understanding of interactions between living and non-living aspects of the environment. .

Labour migration has a long history in the Pacific islands’ region, from the ‘blackbirding’ era at the end of the nineteenth century when islanders came to work in the cane fields of Queensland, until this century when once again islanders came to work in Australia and New Zealand, this time in orchards and horticulture. .