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They say democracy is a serious matter. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never voted.* As a non-citizen for many years, I couldn’t here, and Dutch democracy – with its multi-party governments, supported and criticised by a vigorously diverse …

My father was a front door man. Pardon my indelicate phrasing – the notion of Australia having two portals is the Government’s metaphor, not mine – but I mean to say that he flew into this country, bringing his family with him. As far as …

This is not the first time we have sent the magazine to press and, in the ten days it takes to hit the shelves, seen Julia Gillard’s leadership pushed to the brink. In fact, it has happened rather a lot. This time, at long last, they tipped her …

The Institute of Public Affairs is a right-wing, free market–cheering think-tank that gets significant support from Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch. No one outside of the IPA knows how much, but it’s a lot – enough, as Media Watch …

On 14 January, Julia Gillard leapfrogged Kevin Rudd to become Australia’s 16th longest–serving prime minister. On 16 March, she slipped past Australia’s first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton, into 15th place. At the start of next month, …

On the day the April issue of the Monthly went to press, Simon Crean called for a leadership spill. No one knew what was going on, certainly not in this office. Was Crean sincere in his professed support for Kevin Rudd? Or was he a stooge for …

“We’ve got your back, Prime Minister,” was how Paul Howes waved Julia Gillard off the stage at last week’s AWU conference on the Gold Coast – a slightly chilling pledge from a self-professed faceless man of the Labor Party. But who did have …

Aboriginal violence and its interpreters

This week marks the end of my rookie year as editor. It’s been an interesting time for such an apprenticeship.  Left, right and centre, magazines and newspapers are going under. Print is finished, as the electronic media keeps reminding us. Meanwhile …

In August 2010, just 10 days before the federal election, Pauline Hanson’s former Svengali, John Pasquarelli, attempted to bring down the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Fifteen years earlier, police investigating an alleged fraud within the Australian …

In 1997, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter took a band and three of their kids on a tour of the indigenous communities of Cape York Peninsula, hosting songwriting workshops in schools. They began in Aurukun, and descended down the Cape via Pormpuraaw, Kowanyama, …

How different things look in spring. Take ‘Rudd’s forces’. Back in the gloom of winter, they radiated real menace. Now they’re more like a ‘trick or treat’ Halloween posse. There they go, door to door, trying their darnedest to look scary: …

Six months ago, when this editor was still very fresh in the job, October’s special arts issue loomed as a challenge. Having spent close to half my adult life in the Deep North, the arts had faded from view, the Big Mango excepted. A little added perspective …

Quality journalism may be several things, but it is not the hunt for an imaginary Order of Lenin medal. In 1996, a few months after John Howard replaced Paul Keating as prime minister, the editor of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, then still a broadsheet, …