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...
Foreign Affairs
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Robert Manne
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | Foreign Affairs | Politics
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Hugh White
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The Nation Reviewed | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Foreign Affairs
The big story of 2009 has been the economic downturn, better known as the Global Financial Crisis, and the biggest part of that story has been the continuing upswing of China. Its ability to keep growing at 8 or 9% has so far saved the world from a much longer and deeper...
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Tim Soutphommasane
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The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics
Many Australians will remember Jason Yat-sen Li from the 1999 referendum campaign, when he was a twenty-something lawyer and a leading advocate for the ‘yes’ camp.
A Sydney-born Australian of Chinese heritage, the charismatic Li seemed to embody the cultural promise of...
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Geoffrey Robertson
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The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics
The most remarkable feature of the National Human Rights Consultation Report, released last month, is its projection of the voices of ‘ordinary people’ (a condescending phrase used by lawyers to describe people who are not lawyers). These voices are alternatively laconic,...
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Peter Doherty
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The Monthly Essays | Environment | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics
The scope of what science can do is constantly being enhanced by technology. While microbiology is benefiting from new, ultra-high-speed gene and protein sequencers, climatology is being informed by next-generation satellites that can measure the depth and area of ice sheets...
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Tim Flannery
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The Monthly Essays | Environment | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics
For all their importance, the international climate negotiations have hardly been pursued with urgency. Until recently, they have been somewhat Wagnerian in character: seemingly interminable and with expectations of resolution eternally denied. In September, however,...
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Shane Maloney
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Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics | Society & Culture | Encounters
On 1 December 1945, as British rule of India entered its tumultuous final phase, Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Calcutta. That night, he held the first of a series of meetings with the Raj’s local representative, Richard Casey, the governor of Bengal.
Dick Casey...
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Hugh White
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The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs | October 2009 | Politics
Few of us are pacifists, so most of us accept that these strategic decisions must sometimes be made. But, in Australia, we have not faced them for a long time. Not since Vietnam have Australian leaders, and Australian voters, had to take responsibility for deliberately...
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John Birmingham
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The Monthly Essays | August 2009 | Foreign Affairs
In the Australian imagination, for the most part, the future arrives every day from the east, where the sun’s first rays wash over the lighthouse at Byron Bay, before flooding across the thin green band of settlement running from the jungled tip of Queensland down to Hobart’s...
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Greg Barton
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July 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs
This year’s parliamentary election was a rather boring affair. Australian journalists and academics found little to get excited about, but this was a good thing: no news really was good news. In Australia we fall, perhaps too readily, into the cynical habit of seeing...
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