THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"The announcement of Macquarie's remuneration is a perennial of the news cycle ... The generosity of the bank's executives towards themselves scaled new heights in the latest financial year, when they shared $209 million, three-quarters of that being trousered by half a dozen individuals ... Yet the tone of media reports is seldom hostile: in recent times, the tendency has even been to pre-empt criticism that is scarcely audible anyway. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher called Macquarie's latest pay bonanza ‘not a failure of Australian values but a success of Australian internationalisation'. Public debate about salaries was excellent, stated Matthew Stevens in the Australian, because ‘it helps to educate all of us of the necessity to pay the price for the talent that creates the wealth-machine which is Macquarie.'"

In "Who's Afraid of Macquarie Bank?" Gideon Haigh, author of the award-winning Asbestos House: The Secret History of James Hardie Industries, profiles Australia's most successful financial institution of recent times. Through an analysis of the ‘Macquarie Model' and the company's strategy of developing infrastructure, taking on a role usually handled by government, Haigh tells the intriguing story of the so-called millionaires' factory. How prepared are Australians, he asks, for a business to be responsible for services on which the public depends?

"It is not just another big company making a tonne of money; it is a company increasingly standing in for the state, and not just in Australia. Two of its biggest recent purchases have been British assets of the most public kind: the venerable utility Thames Water, acquired by a Macquarie-led syndicate last October for £8 billion, and the emergency-services communications network Airwave, for which £1.9 billion was paid in April. Thames looks like the bank's gamest bet yet: massively pro?table, but with pipes so decrepit that almost a third of the water that flows through them seeps into the ground. London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, has derided it as ‘the unacceptable, unsustainable and irresponsible face of privatisation'."

"There are deeds of political courage that fizz and burn and have no lasting effect - or only a delayed effect. I leave these to other collectors; my collection is made up of deeds performed by those in power and which have a lasting consequence. This is political courage allied to statecraft and not to defiance, prophecy and martyrdom."

In "Political Courage: Some Australian Examples" eminent historian John Hirst tracks the actions of Australians in positions of power who went against the grain. From Arthur Phillip's employment of convicts as police at Sydney Cove to Henry Parkes' campaign for federation, Arthur Calwell's role in changing immigration policy to Paul Keating's sell-off of public assets, Hirst's essay illustrates the importance of independent thinking, passion and daring in the nation's politics.

"I am happy to have not too much transparency in our politics; the hold of the people is the loose one of punishing for serious mistakes. For all that our system appears to push politicians into short-term considerations of survival, in fact it is a very open one allowing plenty of room for creative leaders who are willing to take risks. Part of the skill of a good leader is knowing when the odds of failure have lengthened. Part of the magic of good leadership is that dangers melt away in the face of it."

"If Australia takes a principled stance on the death penalty internationally by insisting it should not apply to any crime, most European countries - the ‘champions of death-penalty abolition', as Philip Alston, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, puts it - would show solidarity. European nations, Alston says, ‘won't extradite anyone to a country where a person might be executed. If an Indonesian shot 500 people and fled to Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights prevents a European country from returning that person to Indonesia, unless the government of Indonesia gives an assurance that that person will not be executed.'"

In "Australian Exceptionalism" ABC journalist Daniel Hoare interviews legal experts who question the Australian government's inconsistent position on capital punishment in other countries, and investigates how this may affect the fate of the six members of the Bali Nine who have been sentenced to death. It is hypocritical, the UN's Philip Alston argues, for a government to plead for the lives of its own citizens - as Australia did in the case of Van Nguyen, who was executed in Singapore last year - while failing to oppose the death penalty for all crimes in all countries. Drawing links with the Australian Federal Police's controversial role in the capture of the Bali Nine in Indonesia, Hoare offers a layered portrait of shifting Australian attitudes towards the death penalty.

There's also Richard Bourke, a defence lawyer working in America's Deep South on capital-punishment cases who, in an open letter to the prime minister, asks him to consider the implications of condoning the execution of prisoners such as Saddam Hussein and the Bali bombers.

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Almost half the electorate never believed in Howard as the leader of the Australian people, and always saw him primarily as a partisan ?gure of con?ict and division. Left-liberals were appalled by the way he gave permission to Pauline Hanson to air her racist views; by his evasion of responsibility for the children-overboard affair and for the scandalous behaviour of the Australian Wheat Board; by the harshness and hypocrisy of his asylum-seeker policies; by his stacking of public bodies with right-wing warriors; by his government's unrelenting hostility to the ABC; by his bullying of public servants; and so on. Many trade unionists and working-class voters never trusted him not to govern as Liberal governments always do, in the interests of small and big business. And many Australians of ethnic background distrusted his backward-looking, British-centric version of Australian nationalism. These people are all still there. And, as the rising vote for Labor in blue-ribbon middle-class Liberal seats shows, liberal Liberals with moral qualms have also been defecting."

In the Monthly Comment Judith Brett assesses John Howard's self-professed status as a "suburban everyman". She suggests that through WorkChoices, Howard has undermined the egalitarianism that he so often espouses, compounding the anger caused by the war in Iraq. Successful leadership, Brett argues, is a delicate balance of opposites - unity and division, the language of attack and the language of the statesman - and the prime minister is finding it ever harder to strike that balance.

"Nation, economy, strategic national interest: none of these is working anymore for Howard. And he is now faced with a new Labor leader who is proving frustratingly resistant to being characterised as a ?gure of division in the well-worn Liberal way: as a creature of the unions, and as prone to corruption and blind to con?icts of interest."

"Gastronomy was ?rst de?ned by the Frenchman Brillat-Savarin in the early nineteenth century as ‘the reasoned comprehension of everything connected with the nourishment of man', and more recently not quite de?ned by the Australian academic Barbara Santich as ‘lying at the confluence of the intellect and the senses'. We used the word to raise the stakes, to push away the pejorative label of ‘foodies'. Now that Food Studies has as much cachet as Calamity Physics in universities perhaps the symposium might take a friendlier title, but tradition holds, just as it does at the table."

In "The Big Cheese" Gay Bilson indulges in south-eastern Tasmanian produce at the 15th Symposium of Australian Gastronomy, a feast of all things local - an antidote to the supermarket ­- where the food served has grazed in the same places as the symposium's guests.

"The final banquet was held in a privately owned shed. We nibbled on steak tartare, thinking little of that choice until the doors of the shed were opened. The table was a paddock. Grass, smelling richly of soil, covered the entire surface. Tufts and mounds had been artfully created. Mushrooms sprang from the paddock and apples were strewn about."

Plus, Kate Rossmanith visits One Tree Island, a tiny mound off the Queensland coast where land and water are almost one; Richard Cooke talks to the man who inspired  jazz great Buddy Rich's infamous "scream tape"; and Charles Firth questions the portfolio frenzy that has seen his sister become the New South Wales government's minister for almost everything.

ARTS & LETTERS

"This is the sound of 1962-63: a massive wash of instrumentation and arrangement with a lead vocal wailing over the top, usually about a boy whom the singer has just met and wants to marry. It's pre-Beatles and pre-Dylan, the last big gasp of innocence before the '60s rush it all away. It's candy?oss hair, the Kennedy administration, big voices and simple choices: He walked up to me / And asked me if I wanted to dance. And it's magni?cent."

In "Pop Producer in B-Grade Movie Actress Murder Trial" Monthly rock critic Robert Forster reviews a new biography by Mick Brown charting the rise and fall of Phil Spector, the man responsible for the finest melodies and over-the-top pop arrangements of the early '60s who, after a long decline, is now standing trial for murder.

"Drinking, bodyguards with guns, Spector with guns, the breakdown of his marriage to Ronnie Spector, three unwanted adopted children, his bottled-up childhood trauma, the head-trip of stardom, years of indulgence of his behaviour - all now came out and ran free. And it was a mess: in Brown's book there are a hundred pages of disintegration covering the period after the Beatles and solo-Beatle work stopped in 1971. Some recording got done, but Spector ?red a gun in a Lennon session, held a gun to Leonard Cohen's face and took aim at Dee Dee Ramone."

In "A Natural Competitive Advantage" former Labor minister John Button reviews ex-Liberal Guy Pearse's new book, High and Dry, which contends that energy- and mining-industry heavies have used their influence to stall government action on climate change.

"Pearse has a habit of asking inconvenient questions, ones seldom mentioned by politicians or lazy commentators ... What happens when the coal runs out? Even without climate change, what should the future economy look like? Where's the country going to be in 20 years' time? What industries are we likely to have contributing to exports? Have we squandered chances to develop industries like solar and wind power?"

There's also Luke Davies, The Monthly's film critic, on Will Speck and Josh Gordon's Blades of Glory and the new movement in comedy that its star, Will Ferrell, has helped pioneer; and Juliana Engberg on this year's Venice Biennale, where subtlety rather than shock value has dominated the art on offer.