Security Challenges
Volume 13, No.1 (2017)
Australia’s Northern Shield
Hugh White tells a story that, on a 1986 visit to Indonesia as Minister for Defence in the Hawke Government, Kim Beazley called on military commander-in-chief Benny Murdani. The latter’s abrupt and deliberately offputting first question to Beazley was “Would you go to war over PNG?” Beazley’s response: “Yes… but we wouldn’t tell them that!”