21st October 2011
There is much excitement here about the visit by HM The Queen. She comes of course as Queen of Australia, so it’s the Australian government who have made all the arrangements for her programme. I have just come from a reception at the Parliament in Canberra where Her Majesty met Australians from many walks […]
26th September 2011
Last week I attended the annual Strategic Dialogue talks with senior officials from the Foreign Office, Defence and other agencies, and their Australian counterparts. They took place at the Foreign Secretary’s historic London residence in Carlton Gardens. We covered a very broad range of foreign policy issues from Asia to Afghanistan, the Middle East and […]
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12th September 2011
Jeremy Browne, FCO Minister of State, spent three days in Australia visiting Sydney and Brisbane. He commented that the country had changed since his last visit as a 19 year old backpacker in the 80s, but the welcome was just as warm. He noted that Australia is now the world’s 13th largest economy, a member […]
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6th September 2011
I was involved in a number of events last week which reminded me of the multi-faceted relationship between Britain and Australia. On a sunny morning in Canberra, I laid a wreath at a memorial service to honour Australians who had served in the Malayan Emergency (1948-60) and Indonesian Confrontation (1962-66). These successful campaigns are nowadays […]
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1st September 2011
Last weekend I attended the annual Hayman Island Retreat organised by the Australian Davos Connection. It is a prestigious gathering of senior figures from the worlds of business and government, together with eminent academics and thinkers to provoke discussion on long term trends. This year’s theme was .”On the Edge – confidence in the face […]
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31st August 2011
Mark Sedwill, the UK’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, visited Canberra last week. He is a former British Ambassador in Kabul, and was NATO Civilian Representative alongside General Petraeus until earlier this year. So he was already well known to many of the Australian interlocutors on whom he called. I took him to see […]
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18th August 2011
Last night, I was pleased to be invited by the Blue Star Intercultural Centre to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, over a traditional Iftar dinner in a Muslim family home in the Canberra suburbs. Having lived for the last four years in Singapore where a sixth of the population are Muslim, I knew […]
29th July 2011
Australian Olympic experts were extraordinarily complimentary about the London Olympics at events I attended in Canberra and Sydney on Wednesday to mark the milestone of ‘One Year To Go’. The Sydney event, a fundraising dinner for the Australian team, was a fantastic spectacle. There were 800 people including some 80 Olympians. The room was decked […]
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27th July 2011
A busy few days, with a trip to Perth to recce for the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting which will take place in October. Hosting a meeting for 54 heads of government and HM The Queen is quite a tall order, but we were impressed with the professionalism of Australian plans. It is shaping […]
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19th July 2011
It was an unusually “legal” week for me in Sydney last week, with Lord McNally, Minister of State for Justice attending the Commonwealth Law Ministers Meeting, and later in the week the Rt Hon Dominic Grieve MP, Attorney General, participating in a separate Quint meeting with his opposite numbers from Australia, the US, Canada and […]