THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"In February this year, Maxine McKew announced that she would seek preselection for the federal seat of Bennelong, the very seat John Howard has held since he entered federal parliament in 1974. An audacious move, I thought, aggressive even, to beard the ageing lion in his den, to remind the nation that the PM is also a local member and his seat not as safe as it once was, and to distract him from the national campaign with the sort of local campaigning he has never had to do. But this is not how McKew sees it. ‘I have a belief that democracies depend on a strong multi-party system, and parties only thrive when committed individuals are prepared to put their hands up ... I am providing the people of Bennelong with an alternative.' And she compares the alternative she provides to Howard in Bennelong with the alternative Kevin Rudd is providing as prime minister."

In "It's Bennelong Time", political commentator Judith Brett spends time on the campaign trail with former ABC broadcaster Maxine McKew, who is tapping into a mood for change among voters. In an age of political cynicism, of disaffected and often fragmented community, McKew's campaign - based on talking with and listening to people, and supported by dedicated volunteers - is a reminder that politics does not have to be only about power, but can be driven by connection to others, by the desire to give back and to make a difference.

"She says, again and again, that what she wants to do is to give people in the community a voice, to bring them into the national conversation about our future. And she finds, out and about campaigning in Bennelong, that people want to talk: about water, climate change, WorkChoices, health and hospitals, education, honesty in government. Her role is to listen; and then to persuade them that on all these issues and more Kevin Rudd and Labor are an electable alternative to Howard and the Coalition, and that they will provide a ‘government for the future, for the twenty-first century'. ‘My job is to persuade people to vote Labor, not by denigrating Howard, but by persuading them that I will be a better representative for Bennelong and that Labor will be a better government for Australia. The campaign is about a prime minister who has stopped listening.'"

"The reach of jobs into our lives goes beyond the hours they eat up, paid and unpaid. For many of us, our job defines who we are. Work is the second most common way that Australians define their identity, after family. Perhaps we have, by default, allowed work to become the central organising factor of our lives, allowed it to seduce us with its rewards, financial and otherwise. Perhaps many of us could be more disciplined about turning off the mobile or the computer, about knocking back extra work and knocking off on time."

In "Open All Hours", Diana Bagnall investigates industrial relations from outside the falsely polarised politics of Left and Right - beyond the stereotypes, beloved of politicians, of militant union leaders and power-hungry bully bosses. Through wide-ranging research and personal examples she illustrates how we are locked into a work-spend cycle, and how the nine-to-five, five-day working week has long been overtaken by our demand for easy access to goods and services, our need for comfort, and why ­- shackled to debt, as most of us are - there is no point in nostalgically wishing for its return.

"Come voting day people still have to choose, and it suits the process to configure that choice broadly in terms of Left and Right. Yet Left and Right have long been banging into each other in the centre, and in the centre are the economics of the marketplace, espoused with different degrees of fervour but dominant everywhere. Economists assume that people are rational ... and free-market economists in particular have persuaded most of the world over the past 30 years that rational behaviour is self-interested."

"‘Competitions are terrible,' says Stefan Heinemeyer, the diminutive, twinkling cellist of the Atos Trio, from Germany. ‘You go in with certain expectations. It's a lottery. That's why you have to go in a lot.' ‘Competitions are a necessary evil,' adds the group's pianist, Thomas Hoppe."

And in "Like Love in a Marriage", concert pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy follows the winners and losers of the recently held Fifth Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition. Through the frame of her own experiences, she offers an empathetic, elegant insight into the trials and triumphs of the competitors, and the brutal realities of classical-music contests.

"Music and competition is an odd coupling, though not a recent one. History abounds in legendary musical duels - Handel and Scarlatti, Mozart and Clementi, Liszt and Thalberg - that were frequently declared draws. Modern competitions tend to be less diplomatic, and their failings are well documented. There is the curse of the first-prize-winner, who rarely goes on to the expected great career; the compromising nature of juries, which can reward everyone's second favourite over the artist who thrills someone and offends another; the veneration of accuracy over artistry; the inevitable political corruptions."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"In late May, the prime minister admitted at a parliamentary party meeting that he had no rabbit left to pull out of the hat. The comment instantly leaked. Its chief interest was not as evidence of growing desperation. That was obvious by now. It was interesting rather because it revealed what Howard's characteristically disciplined rhetoric normally conceals: how his political mind actually works."

In the Monthly Comment, Robert Manne examines John Howard's attempts - sustained, complex and, infuriatingly for him, thus far unsuccessful - to wedge Kevin Rudd and thereby incite a turnaround in the polls. On the issues of the "national emergency" in the Northern Territory's remote Aboriginal communities and the revoking of Dr Mohamed Haneef's visa for supposed ties to terrorism, the prime minister was unable to draw criticism from the Opposition. But, argues Manne, this was not due to indifference on the part of Labor; rather, it was because the savvy Rudd possesses an understanding of the wedge-based politics favoured by Howard, and is pursuing a strategy that aims above it.

"The analysis of the Rudd phenomenon as a kind of betrayal rests on a characteristic form of left-wing blindness: the failure to have noticed one of the most prominent features of most contemporary Western democracies. This is the clash between the values of ‘ordinary people' and the values of the prosperous, professional ‘elites' to which most of the left-wing critics of Rudd presently belong. It is true that Rudd failed to do what the Left advised over the Northern Territory intervention and the case of Dr Haneef ... He failed to follow it in part because he instinctively grasped the unparalleled capacity of the prime minister to identify and exploit the kind of issues over which the Opposition could be wedged and, even more importantly, because he is an intelligent man who has worked out that a politics too far removed from the moral instincts of ordinary people will not succeed in the long run."

"That's the thing about science: any answer only generates more questions. ‘People think that if we sequence an organism's genome, we can unravel its mysteries,' says Catherine Hill. ‘They don't understand that it's really only the beginning. There are no easy answers; only very slow unravelling and very small steps. In the end, this project has the same importance as all genome projects: it gives us a much better understanding of biology.'"

In "Ticked Off", Ashley Hay meets an Adelaide-born scientist with an uncanny resemblance to Kylie Minogue and an insatiable passion for nature's tiniest blood-sucking parasites - specifically Ixodes scapularis, a vampiric variety of tick whose genome, in a world first, she has recently completed sequencing.

"In Hill's terms, sequencing a genome is ‘like taking a completed jigsaw puzzle, breaking it into its pieces and trying to remake it, or' - she pauses - ‘it's more than that. It's like taking a book, chopping it into words and bits of sentences, and trying to put them back together again. Parts of it are easy to work out and parts of it aren't.'"

Plus, Annabel McGilvray visits the bustling home of Little Miss Muffett, Oliver Twist and Snow White, and their foster parents; Mungo MacCallum questions the role of never-ending polling in the creation of (usually poor) policy; and Alice Pung visits the other end of town, marvelling at the kind of shops where a handbag can cost $10,000.

ARTS & LETTERS

"JM Coetzee's ability to cut to the bone is terrifyingly impressive. He exposes the ribcage, with the heart beating inside it. There it is, you might say, that simple thing before us. But in novel after novel over the past 30 years, including at least four masterpieces from South Africa as well as a work set in nineteenth-century St Petersburg, based on the life of Dostoyevsky, the heart which he puts before us, and of which he speaks with deceptively Christian weightings, is never simple."

In "A Masochistic Scalpel", Barry Hill reviews JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which weaves the stories of an ageing male author and an alluring younger female translator with essays on politics, writing and philosophy. Coetzee, now living in Australia, is in familiar and yet unsatisfying territory, still cutting to the deep, grappling with his characters' familiar anxieties of rejection, frustration and shame - the disgrace of it all - yet layering irony upon irony and providing a seemingly superficial, if self-critical, reading of his adopted homeland.

"In this strange, sad transplant of a book, a surrogate novel perhaps, a limp comedy, a valedictory ensemble of ironies, a proud, stern act of masochism, Coetzee may want to summon an Australian audience to take him in at the imagined end of his powers - as we do refugees, when we are kind enough. Maybe this is his sly needle into our body politic: that we might kid ourselves that we have decent hearts, such generosity of spirit."

"For all its scattergun energy, The Simpsons Movie is tremendously compressed and zips along at a gag a minute. There are 11 screenwriters listed in the credits (including creator Matt Groening, producer and writer James L Brooks, and long-timer George Meyer), as well as four ‘consultant writers', so you could guess that each looked after about ten gag moments. Everything moves with the whip-crack speed of a half-hour episode."

In "Ho-Diddly-Hum", Luke Davies reviews the blockbuster animated film of the year, The Simpsons Movie. Davies, an ardent admirer of the TV series, is initially optimistic; but, after watching a by-the-numbers reel of self-reflexive gags, is forced to wonder whether such an iconic show, with its cast of hundreds, idiosyncratic humour and acerbic social commentary so suited to the small screen, can adapt successfully to the cinema.  More of a good thing, perhaps, is less.

"The Simpsons is always smart. It's always funny. It's gentle even at its most acidic and satirical. There it is in the box in the corner of our living rooms: every night, this bright little reflection of what it means to blunder through our hopelessness as the surreal world unfolds around us. So we love it. Yes. But when it comes to a film running to 90 minutes, will we love it three times more?"

There's also Gideon Haigh's take on the democracy of the new internet - Web 2.0, the phenomenon of user-generated content such as YouTube and Wikipedia - in his review of English sceptic Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur; rock critic Robert Forster on the reformation of the original line-up of The Saints, Australia's most important punk band, in its (and Forster's) home town of Brisbane, AKA Pig City; Justin Clemens on the art of Linda Marrinon; and Zora Simic on Miranda July's hotly anticipated collection of short stories.