Geography Archives: Australasia

I have a friend Julian King, who Duncan Graham reports has been subjected to a stun grenade as our Australian Federal Police burst through his door to seize his PhD research, phone and computers. Reportedly, the AFP are concerned about OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka _Free Papua Organisation), the indigenous independence movement in West Papua.

Far from the killing grounds of Gaza, an incredible display of defiance to settler colonialism has broken out in, of all places, New Zealand. The two projects–Israel and New Zealand’s–are linked more than many would like to think. Palestinian leaders raise their voices in support of New Zealand’s Māori people at this critical moment.

Māori MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke captured global attention with a powerful haka performed to protest the controversial Treaty Principles Bill.

The Australian Labor-Coalition political class has ignored, and by its actions rejected, UN decisions that Australia is legally obliged to stop its support for the Israeli settler-colonial project, to actively seek to stop Israel’s racial segregation and apartheid, and to cease military, diplomatic, economic, commercial, financial, investment, trade, political, and legal relations with the Israeli occupation.

September 15 marked the third anniversary of the announcement of the AUKUS (Australia, the UK, the U.S.) agreement.

What do two South Pacific countries, two North American countries, one country in the Middle East, and (until recently) one country in southern Africa have in common with Europe?

As the United States’ imperial system and Western hegemony circles the drain, lucid thought is becoming a rare commodity. But there is hope.

A powerful struggle is taking place in Kanaky (New Caledonia) between the indigenous people and French colonial authorities. In the background, the US-led militarisation of the Pacific intensifies.

The thing that stands out for me the most when watching the deeply moving footage of Julian Assange arriving home to Australia is how impossible this all felt until it happened.

After meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last April, New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, sa­id that the two countries had pledged “to work ever more closely together in support of shared values and interests.” In recent moves exemplifying this support, New Zealand has deployed a targeting team to a United States-led coalition conducting strikes against Yemen, extended its military participation in the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, and is considering membership of AUKUS, the anti-China military agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The 2000 residents of Diego Garcia were forcibly removed to make way for a giant U.S. military base.

In early April 2024, the navies of four countries—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States—held a maritime exercise in the South China Sea. Australia’s Warramunga, Japan’s Akebono, the Philippines’ Antonio Luna, and the United States’ Mobile worked together in these waters to strengthen their joint abilities and—as they said in a joint statement—to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight and respect for maritime rights under international law.”

The U.S.-steered Aukus military alliance is cranking up hostilities by inviting Japan into the anti-China pact, writes FIONA EDWARDS of the No Cold War campaign

Five times in the history of life on Earth the corals have perished, swept from the board by conditions hostile to nearly all life. Each time, it has taken them millions of years to evolve anew. Each mass death of corals has been accompanied by the mass deaths of most other species, on land and at sea.

In every country and culture, capitalism depends on an ideological mirage of equal opportunity and reward for effort, to conceal, as much as possible, the reality of brutal exploitation and inequality.

Australia’s richest people are by far the country’s biggest whingers.

‘The violent repercussions of Israel’s war on Gaza are spreading across the Middle East, threatening a much wider conflict,’ Stop the War says.

Since his death on December 30, tributes have been pouring in for John Pilger, an Australian journalist who gave voice to the voiceless and had a talent for putting human tragedies into a political context.

As the new government of nuclear-free New Zealand leans towards joining the anti-China bloc, critics warn of weakened sovereignty in a sea of expanding militarization, Mick Hall reports.

Competition over fresh, clean water supplies is leading corporations and their partners in government into situations that transform water from a useful common good to a scarce, exchangeable asset. This process of commodification and financialization is imbricated in an ongoing colonization of nature, one starkly illustrated in settler colonial contexts like Australia.