Editorial: Beyond the Wasted Decade 

David Ritter
As John Langmore's recent To Firmer Ground: Restoring Hope in Australia makes clear, in so many respects the Howard Government simply failed the nation it was elected to govern. The litany of debacles of the wasted decade of the Howard administration makes for grim reading...

The "Emergency Intervention" in Northern Territory Indigenous Communities

Carmen Lawrence
One of the more disturbing elements of the first phase of the "intervention" was that the tone and the images owed more to political theatre than to well researched, co-ordinated public policy; the responsible Minister, who had more than once displayed dictatorial tendencies, seemed convinced that "law and order" solutions could also be used to tackle the complex social problems which underlie abuse...

The Howard Decade - Separating Fact from Fiction (2007 Reid Oration)

Paul Kelly
I believe that no single label captures Howard PM - he is a conservative, a populist, a reformer, an economic liberal, a nationalist, a radio personality, a war leader and cultural warrior. Each of these guises is an insight into his political character and their multitude testifies to his complexity...

The rise of contracted aid delivery in Australia's international development policy

Dan Vujcich
Until April 2006,  only Australian and New Zealand companies and organisations were eligible to tender for aid projects, prompting Tim Anderson to surmise that "[w]ithdrawal of aid" would have much greater impact on the handful of Australian companies that hold most of AusAID's contracts" than it would on the "beneficiaries" in recipient nations...

Valedictory Speech

Michael Ondaatje
Of course, intellectual curiosity and drive are not simply "in us"; we are not "born" with either. In my view, they take hold - and sometimes take over - when you're exposed, for the first time, to that extraordinary teacher. The teacher who eschews dogma of any kind and who creates a learning environment in which you feel able to take chances with your thinking...

Review: Cameron Forbes' Under the Volcano: The Story of Bali

Sophie Loy-Wilson
Beautifully written and painstakingly researched, Under the Volcano goes beyond the constrains of popular history or travel log to make a serious and scholarly argument about the heritage of genocide and violence in Indonesia, and the links between such a history and the emergence of the militant Islamic terrorism which has had such devastating impact in our own time...