Journal publications

President Joe Biden's assertion that 'America is back' and will embrace 'strategic competition' with the People's Republic of China has been welcomed in Australia as a sign that the United States is returning to a 'normal' grand strategy after the turbulence of the Trump administration. This article argues, however, that this is a problematic assumption as it ignores the question of how American grand strategy choices are made and articulated.

This paper suggests Australia’s economic exposure to China creates three distinct risks: a Chinese growth shock that comes with a ‘hard landing’, a structural shift towards less import and natural resources–intensive Chinese growth, and the Chinese Government disrupting trade ties for coercive purposes. With external demand for Australia’s goods and services largely exogenous, the scope to mitigate these risks by reducing exposure to China, without resorting to costly market intervention, is limited. At the same time, the probability and scale of each risk should not be overstated.

Currently, the US alliance has a prominence in national debate arguably comparable only to the times of the Vietnam and 2003 Iraq wars. Yet for 20 years, debates over the Anzac legend have been entwined in discussions of the alliance and vice versa. At the same time, successive Australian governments have presided over institutional enhancements to the alliance.

Since 2017, the political and diplomatic relationship between Australia and China has seen better days; notably, in that, no Australian Prime Minister has been invited to China since 2016. Yet despite these tensions, the economic relationship remains strong. The traditional mainstay of the trading relationship (natural resources for manufactured goods) remains solid and has been joined by an increasing flow of services (tourism, education, and logistics).

Economic shocks from COVID-19, coupled with ongoing US-China tensions, have raised debates around supply chain (or global value chain) organisation, with China at the centre of the storm. However, quantitative studies that consider the global and economy-wide impacts of rerouting supply chains are limited. This study examines the economic and emissions impacts of reorganising supply chains, using Australia-China trade as an example. It augments the Hypothetical Extraction Method by replacing traditional Input-Output analysis with a Computable General Equilibrium analysis.

While there is a proliferation of studies on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), there is a gap in the literature in terms of an exploration of the costs and benefits from the perspective of the energy sector, in both the areas of sectoral development and energy transition. This paper uses Australia as a case study. The paper is the first to quantify the impact of the BRI in the energy sector, and the analysis informs the current debates on the BRI in Australia.

This book chapter recaps and unpacks a year of crisis, control, recovery and refocus in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economy, drawing implications for the global economy and Australia.

This paper begins by critically reviewing the theoretical basis underpinning use of economic coercion to shift a target country’s political positions, drawing attention to the likelihood of success being context-dependent. Six case studies are then documented where a coercive frame is evident in reporting and commentary to interpret Chinese actions taken against Australian exports since 2017. These show that trade impacts of Chinese actions have generally been modest in scale, short-lived and/or significantly mitigated.

With continuous growth, the global LNG market is becoming increasingly competitive over time, and Australia is at the forefront. This paper makes the first attempt to analyse the dynamics of Australia's LNG export performance, using an improved Constant Market Share (CMS) model and UN Comtrade LNG trade data in four sub-periods spanning 1989 to 2017.

This book chapter examines the challenges faced by Australian universities as they navigate issues around free speech on campuses and research collaboration with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The University of Queensland (UQ) serves as a case in point, with debates around protests and counter-protests supported by the PRC’s Consul-General in Brisbane raising questions around free speech and foreign interference by the PRC government in Australian universities.