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Current Issue
The Saboteur
Kevin Rudd’s unrelenting campaign to regain power
By Erik Jensen
Kevin Rudd began his second campaign for the leadership of the Labor Party by not standing. Just after 10 pm on 23 June 2010, on the so-called night of the long knives, he emerged from crisis meetings to announce that his deputy, Julia Gillard, had challenged him to a ballot. In his last hours as prime minister, Rudd learnt her numbers would crush him. Key unions had withdrawn their support. Powerbrokers inside the party had turned on him. Caucus members, it soon became clear, had never liked him. A psychopath, one backbencher called him. A narcissist, others said. He was a micro-manager and his office, by all accounts, was dysfunctional. “This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party,” a powerbroker told ABC TV’s Chris Uhlmann. “Now that his only faction – Newspoll – has deserted him, he is gone.” But...
May 2013
We Need to Fall Out of Love With Obama
By Richard Cooke
It’s hard to imagine the current scandals wreathing the White House will do much to dim the glowing image of Barack Obama over here. The fact various administration officials targeted political opponents with tax probes, spied on journalists and failed to protect the Benghazi embassy seems...
 Current Issue
Modern madness
DSM-5 and the mental illness make-over
By Nick Haslam
Over the past century psychiatry has described conditions that would have once been medicalised, moralised, criminalised or perhaps dismissed as harmless eccentricity. The concept of “mental disorder” now contains a centrifugal assortment of ills that number in the hundreds. This...
May 2013
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
By Michaela McGuire
"Australia is no longer in Australia's migration zone" sounds like an Onion headline, but unfortunately it's straight out of the government's playbook. Yesterday, Parliament voted to excise the Australian mainland from Australia’s migration zone, closing the doors to refugees but opening the window for the rest of the world to make as much fun of us as they...
May 2013
But The Australian is Elitist, Too
By Richard Cooke
David Flint must be kicking himself. Watching the debate started by Nick Cater’s book The Lucky Culture, among John Howard, Mark Latham, Janet Albrechtsen (and many, many more), he must have trouble shaking the feeling that he’s missed out on his dues. After all, Flint had already written the book ten years ago, when it was a searing critique of progressive intellectuals...
SURVEYING THE WRECKAGE
Ford's announcement that it was 'accelerating its business transformation' in Australia was a shock, but no surprise. Ever since it stopped making cars for export in the early 2000s there has been a question mark over the...

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Pivoting from a war footing, Obama acts to curtail drones "Declaring that 'America is at a crossroads,' the president called for redefining what has been a global war into a more targeted assault on terrorist groups...

Suspect was inspired by cleric banned from UK after urging followers to behead enemies of Islam "Today, in comments met with outrage, the cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed told that he could understand...

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The Nation Reviewed

Current Issue
Taxes, death and superannuation
It’s only super till you die
By Judith Brett
Taxing has never been easy. It has, however, become harder in Western countries. The “victory” of neo-liberalism, as declared by Rupert Murdoch in his speech to the Institute of Public Affairs last month, has left us with the expectation, if not the reality, of smaller government. Although many of us still share the view of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jnr that taxation is the price we pay for living in a...
Current Issue
The nominal rewards of football
Ayce names in the AFL
By Peter Cronin
AFL footballers’ names in 2013 suitable for jockeys and unsuccessful petty criminals Jimmy Bartel, Billie Smedts (first prize), Jack Viney, Lenny Hayes, Eddie Betts, Sam Siggins   Names suitable for an aide-de-camp, equerry, viceroy or other diplomatic posting...
 Current Issue
A bid to boost foreign aid
On the road to end poverty
By Andrew McMillen
On a Tuesday morning in March, 80-odd young people wearing red T-shirts hopped off two buses in Lismore, in northern New South Wales, and began canvassing shoppers and retailers in the central business district. Their quest, as declared on their chests, was to help end extreme...
 Current Issue
Helping farmers rebuild with BlazeAid
Blazing fences after bushfire
By Lisa Clausen
An eagle hangs on a hot breeze above the group as they puff up and down the slope, unloading tools and heavy coils of wire. Bright-orange rosehips hang like jewels on scraggly bushes. Across the valley flocks of cockatoos are white against the burnt flanks of the mountains,...

Essays

 Current Issue
Vox
Death in Amsterdam
By Margaretta Pos
One spring day in Hobart, I was having dinner with my son and Goshwin, my Dutch half-brother, who was visiting us, when the telephone rang. My son answered it. “Grandpa!” he exclaimed, as he always did whenever my father called. Yes, we were together, and he passed the handset to Goshwin, who listened, then stiffened. “I’m coming back,” he said and gave me the phone...
 Current Issue
Modern madness
DSM-5 and the mental illness make-over
By Nick Haslam
Over the past century psychiatry has described conditions that would have once been medicalised, moralised, criminalised or perhaps dismissed as harmless eccentricity. The concept of “mental disorder” now contains a centrifugal assortment of ills that number in the...
April 2013
Adventures in Katterland
The Heart and Mind of Bob Katter
By Louis Nowra
One steamy Saturday morning in mid March, Bob Katter, dressed in jeans, a pale shirt and his trademark cream-coloured Akubra Arena, was pacing up and down outside a home in Emerald Creek, 15 minutes’ drive from the town of Mareeba, in Far North Queensland. The house’...
 Current Issue
An anthropologist hits the skids in Cape York
The Aurukun blues of Peter Sutton
By Catherine Ford
In October 2012, Peter Sutton, the Adelaide anthropologist, linguist and author, flew into Cairns en route to Aurukun, Far North Queensland, as a guest of the Cape York Land Council. The following day, the Federal Court would sit in the small town to deliver its fifth and final...
 April 2013
Vox
‘Welcome to Your New Life’ book extract
By Anna Goldsworthy
When you are six weeks old, your grandmother Mariah offers to babysit, so that Nicholas and I can venture out to a restaurant. We discuss this for some days: it is a curiously threatening idea. “Perhaps we could catch up on some sleep instead,” I suggest. “...

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Arts & Letters

 Current Issue
Annette Kellerman & Esther Williams
By Shane Maloney
Both were champion swimmers. Both made a splash in show business. “My God, I wish I could meet her,” thought Esther Williams when she was shown a photograph of Annette Kellerman, the woman she was set to play in the 1952 MGM aqua-musical Million Dollar Mermaid. Taken 30 years earlier, the photo showed Kellerman twirling a parasol as she walked a tightrope high above Santa Monica pier...
 Current Issue
‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent
By Alexandra Coghlan
The popular fascination with Nordic murder mysteries takes a historical turn in Burial Rites, the debut novel from Australian author Hannah Kent. In 1829 servant Agnes Magnúsdóttir became the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland. Preserved in national legend as a...
Current Issue
Rod Laver Arena, 29 March 2013
Bruce Springsteen Live in Melbourne
By Mark Seymour
Witnessing a Bruce Springsteen gig is like watching a game of football. It demands commitment, comes with a sense of sweeping drama – the pause, the rebuild, the surging of forces – and lasts as long: three hours on the dot. It’s also loud and relentlessly...
 Current Issue
Sydney Theatre Company
‘The Secret River’
By Henry Reynolds
Soon after her novel was released in 2005, controversy swirled around Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, based on a pioneer ancestor who had profited from dispossessing the local Aboriginal tribe. But the debate about the troubling task of fictionalising history did not...
 Current Issue
Sugar and spies
The Profumo Affair, 50 years on
By Frank Bongiorno
At Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers gave an eloquent summation of why a semen-stained dress and the manifold uses of a cigar had become of such absorbing interest: “HL Mencken said one time, ‘When you hear somebody say, “...