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Unemployment

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
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, compro

Comment: Palin Politics and the Tea Party

By Don Watson
The fact of the automobile for instance; and Big Oil, which fuelled it; and the strip malls, which made the car indispensable to commerce, including commerce in food; and agribusiness, which made the greater part of United States farming a state-subsidised vertically integrated corporate industry and an alarmingly large number of American citizens obese. Those lines etched in the ice were the sinews of power and influence, though a grea
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 lives of rural poverty into an urban jungle of rapacious capitalism. Haizao discovers that, w
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

The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis

By Charles R Morris
I appreciate the opportunity to comment on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's recent essay. I find myself in virtually complete agreement with his analysis of the origins of the current economic crisis, its historic importance and the nature of the response that gove

The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis

By Dean Baker
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has in his essay given us a bold statement about the nature of the current economic crisis, and laid out an ambitious agenda in response to the crisis. Unfortunately, the diagnosis of the problem is not entirely on target and therefore the resp

Time Loop

By Mungo MacCallum
By a remarkable coincidence, Australia and India share a national day: both countries have their biggest party of the year on 26 January. But the day means very different things to these two members of the British Commonwealth. Indians celebrate the day they b
Public Goods & Pipe Organs

Comment

By John Hirst
If a town hall has an organ should it also have an official town-hall organist? I thought I took a wide interest in public affairs but until I met Professor Ian Harper, who was in charge of refurbishing the organ in the Melbourne Town Hall, I had never turned my mind to

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 fundamentali
Inside New Zealand’s social laboratory

Not All Black & White

By Craig Sherborne
If you think Australia and New Zealand are peas in a pod, you are mistaken.In social justice, New Zealand has, for most of its modern history, been advancing the lantern into the future's blank mist, where Australia has been hesitant to venture. In indigenous
Alan Greenspan’s ‘The Age of Turbulence’

Reigning Bull

By Gideon Haigh
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

Out of Africa

By Gideon Haigh
In the 1960s, one of the catchcries of the anti-apartheid movement seeking the exile of South African athletes was "no normal sport in an abnormal society". So judgemental. Surely that should have been "differently abled" society. And hey, what's normal sport anyway? Curling. Zorbing. Cheese Rolling. You can't tell me those are normal.Similar thinking seems to underlie the apparent indifference to
Palm Island after the inquest into an death in custody

Who Let the Dogs Out?

By Chloe Hooper