Recession

Republicans and the US Presidential Race

Angry Boys

By Julia Baird

The Family Table Restaurant is a small, dingy diner in Atlantic, Iowa, the state known as the Hawkeye State, that claims to be the corn capital of the world. It sits opposite a gas station on a road leading through acres of cornfields, now razed to bristly rows and pale with frost, in what has been an unseasonably warm winter. Occasionally, people passing through pause to fill up on spicy ham

Window Dressing: The Mirage of Political Reform

By Lindsay Tanner

Such sentiments are understandable but misguided. The rules that govern how our political system works matter, but the development of policies and legislation tends to be driven by more fundamental forces. When governmental process delivers decisions we don’t like, our natural response is to reach for the rule book. Just as supporters of winning teams tend to whinge a lot less about umpires

Lessons in Leadership and Paul Keating

The Book of Paul

By George Megalogenis

Comparisons between leaders can be unfair to the incumbent because the one with the job has yet to receive the clemency of political nostalgia. But there was something in the interviewer’s voice that betrayed what many of my colleagues who cover federal politics think at the moment: We miss Keating. Jones signed off by telling Keating he wished they had more time, because there was “as usual, much more to talk about”. The wrap-up

'Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future' By Paul Cleary

By Saul Eslake

For commodity-exporting nations such as Australia, the urbanisation and industrialisation of China and India present a once-in-human-history opportunity. There will be no more Chinas or Indias to come. Not only are there no other nations with as many people, but other nations that may pass through the same ‘commodity-intensive’ stage of economic developm

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.

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

A Gay Old Time

By Benjamin Law

If the huddled group of males gathered outside on the kerbside were teenagers, you’d say they were loitering: hanging out after dark; warming their hands in a circle; talking in low, conspiratorial murmurs. But as it happens, all of the men are in their late fifties a

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 collap

Hollywood Ending

By Leigh Sales

It's Saturday night and Steve Carroll sits behind the counter in his suburban video store watching the door and hoping for customers. Once, back in the "halcyon days", as Steve calls them, he needed two staff for the hectic Saturday shift. Now the action mostly comes fr

Out of Work in a Land of Plenty

The Coming Storm

By John Birmingham

The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis

By David Hale

The current global recession will be a more defining event than any other business cycle since the 1930s. As Prime Minister Kevin Rudd noted in his February essay, "This crisis has become one of the greatest assaults on global economic stability to have occurr

Repo Man

By Craig Sherborne

You might have missed it a few months ago, this amusing aside in the daily news: during the auction of a flash rural property in the old-money recesses of the northern ranges outside Melbourne, two beefy blokes turned up, nosing about the place as if inspecting the shed

The Economic Myths of Peter Costello

Comment

By Andrew Charlton

On 23 September 2004, three days before the launch of his re-election campaign, John Howard visited the marginal seat of Deakin in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He wandered up and down a busy shopping strip, chatting to residents and looking as casual as a politician can when encircled by a phalanx of minders. He popped in and out of businesse