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Lest we forget
April 2013 | Indigenous affairs | Indigenous Rights | Stolen Generations | Tony Abbott | The Nation Reviewed
The Monthly
On 13 February a short speech of perhaps genuine historical significance was delivered in federal parliament. Apart from Eureka Street’s Father Frank Brennan, no one seemed to notice. The occasion was the second reading of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill....
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Australia’s shipwrecked refugee policy
Asylum Seekers | Commonwealth | Gillard government | Immigration | John Howard | Kevin Rudd | March 2013 | Migration Act | Paul Keating | Tampa | The Monthly Essays
The Monthly
Since 1976 fewer than 50,000 asylum seekers have reached Australia on boats. More than half have arrived since the election of the Rudd government; more than a third – over 17,000 – in the past 12 months. Until the Tampa incident in late August 2001, policy regarding asylum seeker boat...
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How vested interests defeated climate science
August 2012 | Carbon dioxide | Climate denialism | Climate sceptics | Climate science | Global Warming | Greenhouse gas emissions | Vested interests | The Monthly Essays
The Monthly
Some 20 years ago, climate scientists arrived at the conclusion that the vast acceleration in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution was causing the temperature of the Earth to rise. Almost all agreed that we were facing a genuine crisis. Some came...
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Rupert is finally reaping what he sowed
James Murdoch | June 2012 | Leveson inquiry | News Corp | News of the World | Phone-hacking scandal | Rebekah Brooks | Rupert Murdoch | The Monthly Essays
The Monthly
For very many years Fleet Street newspapers employed private detective agencies in their search for ever more salacious stories. They provided them with valuable information obtained through bribing public officials including police, conducting surveillance, and hacking into computers and mobile...
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Turnbull Speaks on Life in Politics
April 2012 | Australian Politics | Climate Change | John Howard | Liberal Party | Malcolm Turnbull | Politicians | Tony Abbott | The Monthly Essays
The Monthly
Paul Keating was the prime minister deemed most responsible by Liberals for imposing the yoke of political correctness on the shoulders of the Australian people. In our conversation, it becomes clear that on questions connected to race and ethnicity – and indeed not only them – Malcolm Turnbull is...
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Julian Assange
Assange | Communications | HRAFF | Human Rights | Iraq | Julian Assange | Privacy | Wikileaks | The Monthly Essays | March 2011
The Monthly
Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice, most recently to a journalist from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some fifteen years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer...
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Julian Assange
Assange | Communications | Human Rights | Iraq | Julian Assange | Privacy | Wikileaks | March 2011
The Monthly
Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice, most recently to a journalist from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking...
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Robert Manne on John Howard’s 'Lazarus Rising'
POLITICS | SOCIETY | Asylum Seekers | Australian History | Books | Climate Change | Dubai | Global Warming | Iraq | Memoir | Arts & Letters | December 2010 - January 2011
The Monthly
Having wrestled with this long and boring book for six entire days, I was astonished when I finally realised how little I had discovered about John Howard or his government. Apart perhaps for Howard’s version of his testy relationship with Peter Costello, there is in Lazarus Rising almost no...
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The Rise of the Greens
POLITICS | Bob Brown | Climate Change | House of Representatives | Labor Party | Senate | The Greens | The Nation Reviewed | October 2010
The Monthly
It is not often recognised how well suited the Australian electoral system is for the emergence of significant ‘third force’ parties like the Greens. In the Senate, proportional representation gives such parties a reasonable chance of winning seats. In the House of Representatives, preferential...
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Asylum Seekers
POLITICS | WORLD | Asylum Seekers | Indonesia | John Howard | Julia Gillard | Labor Party | Pacific Solution | Taliban | The Nation Reviewed | September 2010
The Monthly
The first boatpeople were South Vietnamese fleeing from the communist victory of 1975. Between 1976 and 1982, 2000 reached our shores. In order to stem the flow, the Fraser government accepted more than 50,000 Vietnamese from the archipelago of refugee camps in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia...
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Rudd's Collapse
SOCIETY | Asylum Seekers | Climate Change | Emissions trading | ETS | Nuclear | Tony Abbott | The Nation Reviewed | July 2010
The Monthly
The story of the Rudd government falls rather neatly into three discrete chapters. The first involves the fulfilment of promises and the conjuring of dreams. In coming to office, the Rudd government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, an important but easy and essentially costless exercise. On the first...
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Tony Judt’s 'Ill Fares the Land'
SOCIETY | Books | Climate Change | Communism | Gender | Global Warming | Neo-liberalism | The Global Financial Crisis | June 2010
The Monthly
Tony Judt, the historian of the French intelligentsia and postwar Europe, has been suffering a ferociously debilitating motor neurone disease. During this time he has composed for the New York Review of Books a beautiful memoir-in-fragments and a stoical, un-self-pitying account of his illness....
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On Your Bike Tony Abbott
POLITICS | Abortion | Climate Change | Conservatism | John Howard | Liberal Party | Tony Abbott | The Nation Reviewed | May 2010
The Monthly
It would be ridiculous to claim that Abbott has not qualified, or even abandoned, aspects of the apocalyptic and exhilarating Santamaria world view he breathed in as a young man. But it is entirely accurate to insist that he has been fundamentally influenced from then until now by the first...
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After Copenhagen
POLITICS | WORLD | Carbon dioxide | China | Climate Change | Emissions trading | Global Warming | Greenhouse gas emissions | Liberal Party | Malcolm Turnbull | Tony Abbott | The Nation Reviewed | March 2010
The Monthly
Over 200 years ago human beings began burning large quantities of the coal, oil and natural gas that had been buried under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. This may eventually come to be seen as the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind. When the industrial revolution...
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Keith Windschuttle
POLITICS | SOCIETY | Aboriginal People | Australian History | Biography | Genocide | Historians | History Wars | Human Rights | Keith Windschuttle | Racism | Stolen Generations | The Nation Reviewed | February 2010
The Monthly
Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the “orthodox” historians and by...
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The History Wars
POLITICS | Australian History | History Wars | John Howard | Paul Keating | Stolen Generations | The Nation Reviewed | November 2009
The Monthly
Paul Keating and John Howard were early players in what Australians have come to call the History Wars, whose main field of battle is the bitter and still unresolved cultural struggle over the nature of the Indigenous dispossession and the place it should assume in Australian self-understanding. In...
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Paul Kelly's "The March of Patriots"
POLITICS | SOCIETY | Asylum Seekers | Australian Politics | China | Foreign Policy | John Howard | Neo-liberalism | Paul Kelly | Philosophy | Prime Ministers | Reserve Bank | The Monthly Essays | October 2009
The Monthly
We have known for several years that Paul Kelly was preparing to publish the sequel to The End of Certainty. Last month it finally appeared. There can be no question that The March of Patriots is a brilliant, if deeply flawed, achievement and a work of first-rate significance, almost certain to...
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Turnbull's Challenge
POLITICS | Australian Politics | China | Climate Change | Emissions trading | Foreign Policy | Liberal Party | Malcolm Turnbull | The Nation Reviewed | August 2009
The Monthly
Already it is becoming clear that his attempt has failed. A decade ago, when John Howard led the Coalition and Pauline Hanson fascinated the country, the ideological balance of the electorate tilted very clearly to the Right. Since 2007, however, opinion polls have consistently shown that younger...
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The Victorian bushfires and the royal commission
SOCIETY | ABC | Australian History | Black Saturday | Communications | Literature | Sustainability | Travel | The Monthly Essays | July 2009
The Monthly
Shortly after midday we learned that a fire had broken out in Kilmore, some 50 kilometres to the north-west. From now on we were alert, glued to ABC local radio and the Country Fire Authority website. It soon became obvious that this was a serious fire. Wallan received threat warnings. Wandong came...
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The Return of Deficit Economics
POLITICS | Australian Economy | Capitalism | Climate Change | Foreign Policy | Gough Whitlam | History of Australia | Kevin Rudd | Labor Movement | Labor Party | Liberal Party | Recession | Stolen Generations | Think Tanks | Unemployment | The Nation Reviewed | June 2009
The Monthly
The Labor government of James Scullin was elected in October 1929, the month of the Wall Street crash, which history regards as the beginning of the Great Depression. In November 2007, the Labor government of Kevin Rudd was elected ten months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which history...
