Australian Economy

March 2013

Mining The Dead Heart

By Rhys Muldoon

What will this election be fought on? One common answer, naturally, is: "the economy, stupid". With a slight reshuffle of that answer comes the question: "is the economy stupid"? No. It's smart, ruthless and pumping. Have we missed all that it had to offer? Undoubtedly. We, as a nation, have just missed one of the greatest mining booms in history. And what do we have to show for it? Not much.

Gough Whitlam at 95 Years

Comment

By Lindsay Tanner

Many books have been written about the political drama of the Whitlam years, particularly the government’s ultimate dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975. Yet the actual content of the government’s initiatives also warrants serious analysis. There has been a great deal of subsequent commentary about specific issues, but few serious studies of the government itsel

Shi Zhengrong

The Sun King

By Eric Knight

Shi took six months to make his decision. He had arrived in Australia the year before the Tiananmen Square protests had engulfed his homeland. Since then he had worked hard to achieve a settled life. He had started a family, become an Australian citizen, and taken out mortgages on three properties in outer-western Sydney. But Shi decided he would take the risk. In the winter of 2001, Shi, his wife and their seven-year-old son boarded a

The International Student Sector

Exodus

By Margaret Simons

Only a few years ago you could see them being preyed upon at major city railway stations. Touts would hand out leaflets urging them to approach certain migration agents. The noticeboards at TAFEs and universities featured the same gaudy promises: ring this number, email this address and you too could live permanently in Australia. Students who took the bait

The Cult of Green

By Paul Barry

In the four years BBL was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Phil Green and his team of tyros harvested more than $2 billion in fees from the bank’s satellite funds and other operations, and paid themselves almost $1.2 billion in bonuses. Gr

China's Quarry

By Paul Barry

Eighty metres below our vantage point is a flat oblong the size of 15 footy fields. Deep red in colour – because the vegetation has been stripped away – it is speckled with giant yellow earthmovers that look like beetles and a couple of hundred tiny figure

Greenwash

By Guy Pearse

Next time you fly, grab your in-flight magazine or newspaper, carefully rip out a few pages, jot a few words on each, smile knowingly to those seated next to you and stash them away. Upon arrival, use your phone to photograph some billboards in the terminal with the sam

Fire Walk with Me

By Paul Barry

The fictional version would have been far more fun: a factory burnt down to claim the insurance, politicians and businessmen cashing in on the scam, a suicidal stockbroker spilling Swiss bank secrets, and a beautiful girl thrown to her death to prevent her fro

The Hard Stuff

By Malcolm Knox

It was a recession; that’s my excuse. A friend got me a job interview with the world’s second-biggest management consultancy. A man and a woman sat me down in a conference room. They seemed barely older than me, children somehow left in charge of the shop. The inter

Coe & Co.

By Paul Barry

Coe’s best mate, Gordon Fell, is just as bright and another paragon of virtue. The former Rhodes scholar, who made his millions selling property to super-fund investors, was a director of the Smith Family, chairman of Opera Australia and a trustee of Sydney

New Labour & The ALP

Comment

By Tim Soutphommasane

For much of the last three years, the conventional wisdom has been that Britain’s New Labour was experiencing its slow death under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Few would have imagined anything other than David Cameron’s Tories winning this year’s general

Health Reform

Comment

By Bill Bowtell

In a bold reform package unveiled in March, Kevin Rudd proposes that the Commonwealth government should assume the dominant responsibility for funding Australia’s public hospital system. His reforms would strip from the states and territories their century-old steward

The Melbourne Model

Dangerous Precedent

By Margaret Simons

Davis mentions the book when I ask him why, at a time when the higher education sector is more stressed than ever before, he is trying to introduce radical change. “There are always arguments for doing nothing,” he says. True, higher education is badly underfunded by government. True, academics are already under strain. True, the future is risky and uncl

Harry Kakavas and Problem Gamblers

The Biggest Loser

By Paul Barry

This occurred in November 2004, shortly after Kakavas was spotted at the tables in Las Vegas by Kerry Packer, who rang Crown’s chief operating officer, John Williams (son of Lloyd, the casino’s founder), to ask why Kakavas wasn’t losing his money in Melbourne instead. By this time, Kakavas’ self-exclusion order had long ago been lifted (at his request), but he was still barred by Crown fro

Supermarket Sweep

By Benjamin Law

It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a ware

Rudd’s China Policy

Comment

By Hugh White

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

New South Wales

Failed State

By John Birmingham

You cannot blame them, because Perry’s restaurant, located in a grand old insurance building, does soar. To stand in the entry foyer is to find yourself unable to resist craning your neck to gaze up into the vast high spaces, artfully lit by two illuminated working sc

Rising Son

By Malcolm Knox

The Absence of TrustMurdoch’s choice of speech title was a simple pun. The object of his attack was to be the BBC Trust, the governing body that, he argued, has let the public broadcaster run out of control. James Murdoch likes wordplay and literary references. At his Connecticut wedding in 2000, he read Pablo Neruda to his bride, the former model Kathryn Hufschmid; she read James Joyce. Murdoch