Date: Wednesday, 7 May
Time: 5pm to 6.30pm
Registrations: https://webinars.on24.com/latrobeuni/USalliance
Former federal foreign affairs minister Professor Gareth Evans will join an authoritative Ideas and Society panel discussing what many analysts believe is the most pressing question facing Australia at this time: the future of our relations with the United States.
Chaired by La Trobe University Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Nick Bisley, the panel will discuss alliances, tariffs, submarines and the unpredictable times of US President Donald Trump’s second term.
Can Australia still rely on the US for its security, as symbolised by the ANZUS Pact?
How far can Australia rely upon the AUKUS agreement?
How harmful for Australia, both directly and indirectly, might US tariffs prove? And how should we respond?
The trajectory of United States’ foreign policy is arguably more unpredictable than it has been at any time since the Second World War.
Does our close defence and intelligence relationship pose a security danger?
Is it possible that the Trump Administration will allow China to dominate the Western Pacific?
Many analysts believe that the current US Administration is a defence and foreign policy outlier and that in the future the US will return to something more "normal".
Is this likely or even possible? And are there plausible foreign policy and defence alternatives for Australia's future security?
Panellists:
Host: Professor Nick Bisley,
La Trobe University Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor of International Relations
Professor Bisley's research and teaching expertise is in Asia's international relations, great power politics and Australian foreign and defence policy.
Between 2013 and 2018, Professor Bisley was the Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, the country's oldest scholarly journal in the field of international relations. He is a Fellow of the Australian Institute for International Affairs, a member of the advisory board of China Matters and a member of the Council for Security and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.
Professor Bisley is the author of many works on international relations and is quoted in national and international media including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Time Magazine.
Professor Gareth Evans AC KC
Australian National University, Distinguished Honorary Professor
Professor Evans was a Cabinet minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments from 1983-96, in the posts of Attorney-General, Minister for Resources and Energy, Minister for Transport and Communications and, from 1988 to 1996, Foreign Minister.
From 2000 to 2009, he was President and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the independent global conflict prevention and resolution organisation. He has written or edited 14 books and has published many newspaper articles and some 150 journal articles, chapters, and reports on foreign relations, human rights and legal and constitutional reform.
Professor Evans has co-chaired two major International Commissions, on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000-01), and Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (2008-10). He currently Co-Chairs the International Advisory Board of the New-York based Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, is a member of the ANU Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership Advisory Board where he was the founding Chair, and is founding Convenor and Board Member of the Asia Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN).
Emeritus Professor Hugh White AO
Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University
Professor White has worked on Australian and regional strategic, defence and foreign policy issues since 1980. He has been an intelligence analyst, journalist, ministerial adviser, departmental official, think tanker and academic.
In the 1990s he served as International Relations Adviser to then Prime Minister Bob Hawke and as Deputy Secretary of Defence for Strategy and Intelligence. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper.
He was awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2014 for distinguished service to international affairs, through strategic defence studies as an analyst, academic and adviser to government, and to public administration.
Jennifer Parker,
Expert Associate, ANU National Security College
Jennifer Parker is an Expert Associate at the National Security College and an Adjunct Fellow in naval studies at UNSW Canberra. She also holds the position of Nancy Bentley Associate Fellow in Indo-Pacific Maritime Affairs at the Council on Geostrategy.
Jennifer Parker has more than 20 years’ service with the Royal Australian Navy, specialising as a Principal Warfare Officer and completing advanced training in Anti-Submarine Warfare with RAN. She has extensive operational experience from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and most areas in between.
Convenor:
Emeritus Professor Robert Manne AO
La Trobe University Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow
Professor Manne is the author or editor of 27 books, including The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage; The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust; In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right; Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977-2005; Making Trouble; Cypherpunk Revolutionary-On Julian Assange; The Mind of the Islamic State; and, most recently, On Borrowed Time.
Professor Manne was editor of Quadrant between 1990 and 1997 and has been chair of the boards of both The Australian Book Review and The Monthly. He has been a regular public affairs columnist for several Australian newspapers and magazines since the mid-1980s and a frequent commentator on ABC radio and television. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Contact details:
Senior Manager, Media and Communications, Robyn Grace – r.grace@latrobe.edu.au, 0420 826 595