Pandemics remind us that Australia is a Federation, but we are quick to forget

By Dr Carolyn Holbrook As we well remember, COVID incited a high degree of tension between the Commonwealth and the states. The former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce probably put it best when he said: For a while there we went from a federation back to little colonies again. I was waiting for Queensland […]

Knowing What to Do: Mental Health Literacy in Australia

By Richard Trembath ‘What sort of people live about here?’ ‘In that direction’, the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: and in that direction’, waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’ ‘But I don’t want to go among mad people’, Alice remarked. ‘Oh, […]

Democracies are fragile. Australians must act urgently to safeguard ours

AAP/Lukas Coch Carolyn Holbrook, Deakin University The solicitor-general’s recent finding that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s furtive accrual of ministerial portfolios “fundamentally undermined” the principles of responsible government has drawn attention to the precarity of democracy. In seeking to safeguard our democracy, we must consider the extent to which Australians’ long-standing apathy about our democratic […]

Speech by Emeritus Professor Graeme Davison at the Melbourne launch of The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre

Melbourne Athenaeum Library, 15 July 2022 The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre, edited by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski,Melbourne University Press. Many words– true and heartfelt words– have already been spoken and written about Stuart and his remarkable legacy. Among them, I particularly remember those spoken by his daughter Mary on the […]

Leadership now: what can history tell us?

James Walter Australians are ‘good at elections’ as Judith Brett has persuasively argued. Our practices of mandatory and preferential voting have saved us from the institutional entrenchment of extremes of opinion that have surfaced in the public domain, and that have pushed parties and politics in, say, the United States, to brinkmanship over positions […]

Can ‘wicked’ policy problems be successfully tackled over time?

By Brian Head There has been a growing literature on ‘wicked problems’, which are generally seen as complex, controversial, intractable and evolving. Both the nature of the ‘problems’ and the best ‘solutions’ are strongly contested by political parties and various stakeholders. The problems are ‘wicked’ in the sense that they are not easily tamed […]

Why did women’s liberationists in Melbourne protest Anzac Day?

Jacquelyn Baker explains why women’s liberationists in Melbourne demonstrated against Anzac Day in the 1980s and considers how their concerns are still relevant today. On 26 April 1983, the Canberra Times reported that 168 women in Sydney and seven women in Melbourne had been arrested on Anzac Day.[1] The women in Sydney had allegedly […]

How Might Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Affect Relations between Turkey and Russia?

By Jennifer Chantrell The recent Russian military incursion into Ukraine has shocked the world; even until just a few weeks ago the Ukrainian people were relatively complacent that Russia would not invade Ukraine. The Russian –Ukrainian conflict, however, has been ongoing since 2014 when pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukraine region known as the […]

Will national cabinet survive the COVID ‘opening up’?

Carolyn Holbrook and James Walter look at the future of the federation and the national cabinet. For a brief moment in 2020, it appeared the COVID pandemic might be the catalyst for a new era in Australian federal relations. The national cabinet, comprising the prime minister and state and territory leaders, was established in March […]

Is Expertise A Dirty Word?

Richard Trembath argues that as higher education grapples with cutbacks, constraints and remote learning, it also has to counter anti-intellectualism. ‘Plato is credited with offering the first account of what we mean by knowledge, which was in three parts: you know something, he thought, if you hold it to be true, if it is true […]

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