Capitalism

The 0.01 Per Cent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia

By Wayne Swan

A decade ago, as I waited for my order outside a Maroochydore fish and chip shop, a tall, barefoot young man strolled past wearing a T-shirt that read: ‘Greed is good. Trample the weak. Hurdle the dead.’ Those brutal lines seemed to encapsulate what was then a growing sense of unease in Australia. The world of my Queensland childhood, governed by its implicit assumptions of equality and m

Left Behind: Why the Right Keeps Winning

By Peter Hartcher

It was Carnegie, son of the arch-establishment businessman Sir Rod Carnegie, who emerged as the media star of the Gillard government’s tax forum in October with his call for the wealthiest 15% of income earners to pay 15% more in income tax. “What I am saying is that the economic rents of capitalism are disproportionately cascading towards a smaller and smaller section of the community �

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 itself have been produced. Whitlam’s own book, T

'The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution' By Francis Fukuyama

By Tim Soutphommasane

Most scholars have in them at best one major work. Had Francis Fukuyama ceased writing after The End of History and the Last Man, his hugely influential book of 1992, he could have been content with having produced a magnum opus. In the years since, Fukuyama has continued writing well-received, thoughtful books, but only now has he created something to rival

'How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism' By Eric Hobsbawm

By John Keane

My first scholarly encounter with Eric Hobsbawm happened one afternoon at the London School of Economics, in the late spring of ’89. We were naturally ignorant of the coming revolutions, but the podium was ours on the subject of nations, states and democracy

A Chapter in the Life of a Ballet Legend, Margaret Scott

Maggie’s War

By Peter Robb

When her sister was dying in Africa, Maggie flung some things into a bag and flew from Melbourne to the farm in Swaziland she’d hardly seen in 50 years. There were delays in Johannesburg and more in Swaziland, and Maggie arrived four hours too late for her s

UK Elections

Comment

By John Keane

Last month’s hung parliament in the British election confirms a basic rule of modern politics: whenever markets fail, representative democracy falters. Not just in the UK, but throughout the European Union, the near collapse of the credit and banking system is fuellin

Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'

Obscured by Clouds

By Waleed Aly

In the mid-1960s, a young underground band played a gig at a Catholic youth club. The promoter refused to pay the band, which decided to pursue him legally in a small claims tribunal. The magistrate found in favour of the promoter: the performance, it was held

The Return of Deficit Economics

Comment

By Robert Manne

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 Lehm

Sarah Watt’s "My Year Without Sex" & Antonello Grimaldi’s "Quiet Chaos"

Two Stroke

By Luke Davies

A woman in her thirties, a mother of two, suffers a debilitating aneurism. When the initial shock and panic have passed and she begins to recover from the trauma of brain surgery, a doctor tells her that she's OK for now but that she should consider the stroke

The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis

By Eric Hobsbawm

Kevin Rudd's essay makes two major contributions to the debate on the present world crisis of capitalism, which is now recognised to be the major breakdown of the economic system since the Great Depression after 1929. It recognises clearly that the market fund

Recent Books about the Future

Seers

By Bill Bowtell

Chris Patten, Jacques Attali and George Friedman are past masters of the politics of prediction. They are wily, skilful and powerful servants and shapers of state and international policy. They have stood at the very apex of power in their respective countries - Britain

The Response to the Prime Minister’s Essay

Neo-Liberal Meltdown

By Robert Manne

The causes of the global financial crisis are already reasonably clear. The crisis originated in a series of interconnected developments within the American financial sector. From the 1980s a vast market in obscure and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives developed there. The market grew at an accelerating pace. In 1989 it was worth US$2 trillio

The Global Financial Crisis

By Kevin Rudd

There is a sense that we are now living through just such a time: barely a decade into the new millennium, barely 20 years since the end of the Cold War and barely 30 years since the triumph of neo-liberalism - that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time.The agent for this change is what we now call the

Daniel Mannix & BA Santamaria

By Shane Maloney

In 1935 to be Catholic was to be Irish, and the hierarchy ruled its flock with a firm doctrinal hand and an unchallenged tribal authority - no one more so than Daniel Mannix, the venerable Cork-born archbishop of Melbourne. Tall, gaunt and magisterial, Mannix

Clive Hamilton’s ‘The Freedom Paradox’

In Search of Essence

By Pete Hay

Franchise Nation

By Alice Pung

"I had never worked in a better restaurant." That was what my uncle told us about one of the first jobs he had after arriving in Australia. He wore gloves and a uniform to work; the kitchen was stainless-steel sterile and everything ran like clockwork. If you were a str

Gas!

By Gideon Haigh

Upton Sinclair never had much faith in the movies. When the great American socialist's novel The Moneychangers (1908) was adapted for the screen, he was appalled to find that what he had written as a denunciation of JP Morgan was populated by millionaires performing selfless acts of charity. He later bankrolled Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932), but panicked when the rushes looked too