The Global Financial Crisis

Comment: Blessed are the Wealth-makers

By Don Watson

In 1848 a drover named O’Shaughnessy, the son of a convict, came across a man living in a gunyah in the reed beds of the Lachlan River with a few cows. O’Shaughnessy faded quickly from history, but the man in the reeds, also the son of a convict, was James Tyson and before his life was over he had millions of cattle and sheep grazing on holdings that stretched from Gippsland to the Gulf o

Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard in Retirement

Love thy Leader

By George Megalogenis

A curious feature of our political debate is the way it compels former prime ministers to lose their dignity in the endless feedback loop of the legacy war. The Americans, despite their more openly hostile political culture, treat their ex-leaders with sufficient deference to absolve them of the need for after-the-fact combat. When a memoir is written by a Bush, a Clinton or a Carter, no othe

The Rise of the Sports Betting Industry

Caught in the Game

By Jonathan Horn

Like his brother, Reverend Tim Costello is an Essendon supporter. He was watching the game on television and it left a sour taste. “There’s no question that if the bets get big enough, people will start throwing games,” he tells me. “When there’s so much money at stake, the corruption follows inexorably. While gambling is a part of life, there’s a vice dimension that drops, compromises and changes what should be family and c

Satyajit Das’s 'Extreme Money'

Air Traffic Out of Control

By Lindsay Tanner

Did you know that the Japanese Ministry of Finance advertises Japanese government bonds by claiming that men who own them are more popular with women? Or that Black Sea waterfront properties in Bulgaria were the hottest real estate in the world before the global financial crisis? Or that cacao, corn, dried fish, almonds, tea and rice have all been used as mo

Why One Year After the Election Voters Still Don’t Know Who Gillard Is

Prime Minister, Interrupted

By Annabel Crabb

In Australia, we engage with our political leaders in a way that is very particular to us, and to our democratic model. Compulsory voting obliges us to get involved directly every three years or so. So the kinds of inducements to pay attention that yo

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 t

China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan

Bitter Fruits

By Andrew Charlton

Wo Ju depicts a generation trapped between hope and despair. The series was wildly popular because it captured the human dimension of China’s astonishing economic story. China’s industrial growth has swept tens of millions of young Chinese from their traditional liv

Chariots of Fire: Tony Blair’s Legacy

By Lindsay Tanner

Ten years later, Blair stepped down, exhausted and diminished. Bullied out of office by a relentless rival, a ravenous media and the accumulated weight of many disappointments, he moved on. Now that the government he led is also gone and Blair has recently pub

The Collapse of Storm Financial

In the Eye of the Storm

By Paul Barry

Yet these financial collapses happened at almost exactly the same time: Bernie Madoff was led away in handcuffs in December 2008, just as Storm’s banks pulled the plug on the big Townsville-based financial planner and its unfortunate clients. There are, of course, hug

'How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead' By Dambisa Moyo

By John Edwards

Dambisa Moyo’s 2009 bestselling attack on development assistance to poor countries, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, was sufficiently successful to win her a spot among TIME magazine’s “100 most influential peopl

Mahmoud Saikal and Kabul’s ‘New City’ Proposal

A Tale of Two Cities

By Christopher Kremmer

How like an architect to see the problems of one city as a reason for building another. It wasn’t his idea but Mahmoud Saikal – architect, refugee, ambassador and long-time resident of Walter Burley Griffin’s Canberra – understandably embraced it. The

Sharia Law

The Way to the Watering Hole

By Sally Neighbour

Meanwhile, in a tiny office in Lakemba, south-western Sydney, with prayer beads hanging from the bookshelves and Islamic texts stacked to the ceiling, the Muslim minister and police chaplain Sheikh Khalil Chami quietly and methodically administers sharia law. A woman ha

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. Green, the chief executive, raked in $56 million for himself, while the other head honchos, Peter Hofbauer, Robert Topfer and Eric Lucas, rece

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

Tony Judt’s 'Ill Fares the Land'

State of Tomorrow

By Robert Manne

Tony Judt, the historian of the French intelligentsia and postwar Europe, has been suffering a ferociously debilitating motor neurone disease. During this time he has composed for the New York Review of Books a beautiful memoir-in-fragments and a stoical, un-s

From the Chrysalis

By Don Watson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2010. It was a bad night for neo-cons, neo-liberals and neo-Hobbesians, the last being those wiseacres in and around the now-crumbled Bush administration who had been inclined to justify the “muscular unilateralism” of recent American policy

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 election in May. Yet at the time of writing, Westminster commentators are revisiting the draft obituaries of New Labour they had filed away