Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2019

The trajectory of Australia's foreign policy during the 2010s was set remarkably early in the decade. Over a period of just five months, beginning in April 2010, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd abandoned his Emissions Trading Scheme, Rudd's Labour colleagues subsequently dumped him as leader in favour of Julia Gillard, and Hugh White's essay Power Shift: Australia's Future between Washington and Beijing was published.1 These events decisively framed three enduring and unresolved national questions that defined the past decade of Australian foreign policy: how should we respond to climate change?; are our political leaders still capable of delivering large-scale reform in the national interest?; and how do we navigate a world in which our key security partner and our key economic partner are not the same