The Cricket Tragic - David Ritter

The great cricket writers have long asserted that the game has the capacity to transcend sport.  In the context of the new industrial relations environment, cricket stands as a convenient metaphor for the full spectrum of sporting, artistic and volunteer activities; for social relationships; for community, friends and family...

An Inconvenient Truth...for Western Australia - Michael Bennett

Economically, it is a golden time in the West.  Our growth rivals China’s. Unemployment is at an all time low. Money is flowing into the Treasury's coffers, thanks to stamp duty revenue from a booming property market and mining royalties. The same activities that are bringing us prosperity are also helping to fuel what is now widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest global challenges of the 21st century...

Religiously Affiliated Schooling: True or False? - John Bednall

Funding of non-government schools by both Labor and Coalition governments has encouraged an unprecedented growth of religiously influenced schooling with apparent little regard for the Australian Constitution. It has not been the allegedly elite independent schools of the ilk of Mark Latham's notorious 'hit list' of 61 schools who have been advantaged, but the emergent form of non-Catholic, low fee, systemic schools with specific religious affiliations and evangelical motives...

People are not a Business - Kathy Wake

As a service provider under the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs' (DIMA) Immigration Advice and Application Assistance Scheme (IAAAS), I was recently invited to attend the West Australian launch of DIMA's Client Service Improvement Programme 'People Our Business'...

Noongar Native Title Finding Brings New Hope - Glen Kelly

September 19, 2006 stands as a historic day for Noongar people. It stands as the completion of a cycle, of gaining a recognition of their rights to their country after almost 200 years of ill treatment and degradation at the hands of the colonial and subsequent State and Commonwealth Governments...

New Interventions and Old Asymmetries: Australia and its Solomon Island Neighbours - Debra McDougall

The Solomon Star newspaper reported in July that the newly appointed Permanent Secretaries received a substantial raise. They were earning SI $60,000 (approximately AUD $11,500) and are now to be paid SI $91,000 (just over AUD $17,000); a salary thought high enough to attract better candidates and encourage higher quality work. This means that the highest ranking government administrators in the nation of Solomon Islands, after a 30% wage increase, still earn less than modestly-funded Australian postgraduate students...

Memory and Home - John Hughes

Keynote Address given at the Manning Clark Day of Ideas 2006...

Doing Europe from Australia: an Idiosyncratic Historian's Journey - Richard J B  Bosworth

When Jenny Gregory emailed me with the kind invitation to do this talk, the first thought that flashed through my mind was "23 August, hmm, that is the 67th anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact..."

Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads - Michael L  Ondaatje

On 10 February 2004 neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer rose to deliver the annual Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington DC. The paper, entitled 'Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World', forcefully endorsed the Bush Administration's contentious post-9/11 strategies of unilateralism and pre-emption, and recommended they be encapsulated in a clearly defined doctrine of national security...

Fear Itself: Carmen Lawrence's Fear and Politics - Simon Thackrah

I attended a rally in Perth shortly after the 2001 Federal Election to protest what I thought was the government's shameful policy on asylum seekers. Carmen Lawrence was a speaker, and she articulated with great conviction how immoral the policy was and how wrong her party was to support the government. On the one hand, I admired her guts in confronting her own party; on the other hand, I thought "well, I wish you'd said that before the election!"...