Join a trusted and insightful guide, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to walk though one of the most vexed and consequential questions of our time. Are we witnessing the decline of western/liberal democracy?
External threats to our democracies have not gone away - as Vladimir Putin has demonstrated in Ukraine, but we are now realising that the greatest threats to our democracies are not from without but from within.
Episode 6: Are we hiding under the security blanket of the American alliance?
Recorded at Malcolm Turnbull’s Sovereignty and Security forum held in Canberra.
Is Trump 2.0 an aberration, or a seismic 8 on the Richter scale of international relations? We cannot grit our teeth and ride this out. We must confront reality.
Professor James Curran reminds us of the history between Australia and America, and what it can tell us about our future prospects. These are the closing remarks to the Sovereignty and Security forum.
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2 Apr 2025TRANSCRIPT
Episode 5: Does Australia need to scale up and join up to survive?
Recorded at Malcolm Turnbull’s Sovereignty and Security forum held in Canberra.
This panel examines how Australia pursues its national interest in a “might is right” world, and if we should work with other countries to mitigate the economic damage from Trump’s tariff war.
Panellists include: Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AC KC FASSA FAIIA, Cabinet Minister throughout the Hawke-Keating governments, and Australian National University Chancellor 2010-19; Professor Shiro Armstrong, professor of economics at ANU, Director of the Australia-Japan Research Centre, Editor of the East Asia Forum, and Director of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research; Dr Alan Dupont AO, graduate of the Royal Military College Duntroon and the US Foreign Service Institute, and has worked extensively at the interface of security, politics, business and technology; John McCarthy AO FAIIA,former Ambassador to Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, the United States of America, Indonesia, Japan and High Commissioner to India, is currently a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Melbourne University.
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2 Apr 2025TRANSCRIPT
Episode 4: Can Australia defend itself by adopting the Echidna strategy?
Recorded at Malcolm Turnbull’s Sovereignty and Security forum held in Canberra.
In the absence of support from America, should Australia adopt an Echidna Strategy - friendly to those who don’t mean us harm, and spikey and indigestible to those who do?
This panel discusses the big question of whether Australia can defend itself’, and how.
Panellists include: Sam Roggeveen, Director at the Lowy Institute, and author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace, senior strategic analyst at the Office of National Assessments, an analyst in the Defence Intelligence Organisation; Major General Mick Ryan AM (Rtd), served for 35 years in the Australian Army including in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan as well as on the U.S. joint staff in Washington DC. Because of his writing about the war in Ukraine, and support for its efforts, Mick was sanctioned by the Russian government in 2022; Professor (Brigadier Retd) Ian Langford PhD DSC and Bars served for more than 31 years in the Australian Defence Force as a senior military officer. He is the Executive Director of Security & Defence PLuS, a research initiative between Kings College London, Arizona State University and the University of New South Wales.
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Inside a recent episode
Episode 6: Are we hiding under the security blanket of the American alliance?
Published 2 Apr 2025 · Transcript excerpt
[…] I proposed then that we ditch loud proclamations of sentimental loyalty that instead camera would need to think about the virtues of a quiet alliance, an alliance that retains its significant deterrent value, but one that equally doesn't alone define Australia's relations with the world. I said then that we couldn't assume that future generations of Australians would have the same attitude towards the alliance, particularly given the changing demographics of the country, and that we would have to disabuse senior U .S. policy makers of the view that Australia's support is automatic. Now, I think we can draw the implication that that didn't necessarily happen at all times. […]
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