The federal government is preventing new enrolments in a graduate diploma it fears is being used by non-genuine international students to switch courses and prolong their stay in Australia.
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Helen Paterson’s work on advancing how police and courts understand memory is recognised in prestigious Eureka prizes “What our research shows is that compared to a single-event witness, a repeated-event witness tends to report more gist-like details, the overall details of what typically would happen, and the things that remain constant between the episodes,” said Helen Paterson, an associate professor in forensic psychology at the University of Sydney.
Former foreign minister Alexander Downer’s blunt verdict — that building AUKUS‑class submarines in Adelaide would be a “huge waste” of Australia’s defence budget — landed like a hand‑thrown gauntlet in a debate that touches on strategy, industry and public money. Few public interventions deserve to be dismissed out of hand. Whether one agrees with Downer or not, his comment should trigger a full, clear public reckoning about what the submarine programme is meant to deliver and at what cost.
Defence procurement is never just about hardware. It is about deterrence, sovereignty, shipyards, skilled jobs, national supply chains and the long tail of maintenance and industrial knowledge. Governments that pursue local builds legitimately point to the benefits: domestic industry capability, employment and reduced dependence on foreign yards. Critics rightly point to the higher price, the technical risks and the long timelines involved in creating complex fighting platforms onshore.
That tension — between strategic independence and fiscal discipline — is exactly the conversation the public needs to hear, unvarnished. A senior figure’s “huge waste” remark should not be allowed to substitute for it. Instead, it should be followed by transparent costing, independent assessments and parliamentary scrutiny that make trade‑offs explicit. Australians deserve to know whether the extra money spent on local construction buys genuine sovereign capability, or whether it is mainly an expensive jobs programme with little strategic return.
The stakes are not merely fiscal. Decisions about where to build submarines influence national resilience. If Australia is to host sensitive platforms, it must have the skilled workforce, secure supply chains and infrastructure to sustain them. Those are long‑term commitments that can be worth making — but only if the plan is coherent, affordable and realistic.
There is also an accountability question. Defence budgets are public money and the strategic assumptions that underpin major programs should be laid out for voters. How will capability be sustained? What are the risks of delays and cost blowouts? How will local industry be guaranteed meaningful technology transfer rather than simple assembly work? These are not rhetorical questions; they are practical ones that affect taxpayers and service members alike.
If Downer’s wording was designed to provoke, it has succeeded. The prudent response from government, opposition and defence planners is not to score political points but to accept the provocation as an invitation to greater clarity. Publish independent costings. Open a sober discussion in Parliament. Spell out what local construction will actually deliver and what it will cost in opportunity terms.
Australians broadly support a strong defence, but support is not unconditional. It rests on trust that defence decisions are strategic, efficient and honestly presented. If building AUKUS‑class submarines in Adelaide is genuinely the best way to secure Australia’s future, ministers should be able to prove it. If it isn’t, we should hear that too. The mark of responsible governance is not that it avoids hard choices, but that it addresses them openly and with evidence. That is the kind of debate Downer’s remark ought to spark — and that the nation deserves.
Community angle
The debate affects taxpayers, regional jobs in Adelaide, and national defence credibility. Voters need transparent costing and honest discussion about whether domestic submarine builds deliver real strategic value.
Global trade opens opportunities for economic growth. However, moving goods across borders, between exporters and importers, involves counterparty risk such as payment and liquidity risk. Trade finance facilitates trade by mitigating these risks. Using a new dataset, we find that volatile global financial conditions constrict the availability of trade finance, especially in emerging markets and developing countries. In addition, the level of development of local financial markets influences the supply of trade finance by global institutions.
The South Korean province of Jeju Island wants local construction companies to aggregate containerised shipments to stem losses arising from a direct shipping service from China. Last October, after discussions with Chinese officials, Jeju Island’s government started a weekly container shipping service from China’s Qingdao port in Shandong province, operated by Shandong Marine (SMC), a subsidiary of Shandong Port Group, aiming to realise a direct route, instead of transhipping through Busan ... The post Future for South Korea’s Jeju Island box shipping service looks grim appeared first on The Loadstar .
With ship fires caused by lithium-ion battery cargo continuing to pose a threat to vessel operations, container lines are on the verge of calling for such shipments to be mandatorily classified as ‘Dangerous Goods’. On 23 August, a fire broke out in a container aboard the 8,000 teu CMA CGM Petra shortly after it left Singapore for the Sri Lankan transhipment hub of Colombo. The blaze was extinguished by the crew with ... The post Treat all cargo containing lithium-ion batteries as dangerous, says CINS appeared first on The Loadstar .
