Articles Archive

Dark times

This is to let you know that I have arrived safely in Australia and am being detained in immigration...

By Susan Varga

A woman’s place …

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S commitment to establish a new Indigenous national representative body provides Indigenous Australia with a unique opportunity...

By Megan Davis

Been there, done that, still hoping for more

LET THE READER beware. Whilst this essay is, I hope, objectively written, it is committed. By that I mean...

By Peter Shergold

When the whistle is blown

IT WAS EARLY 1996, and getting late in the evening. Somewhere in a nondescript building in central Canberra, I...

By AJ Brown

Monitory democracy and media-saturated societies

THERE IS A need for a fundamental revision of the way we think about democracy in our times. An epochal...

By John Keane

Consumer democracy

THE IDEA THAT it is the primary function of elected governments to raise the disposable income of their citizens...

By Mark Hopkinson

Real communities

THE FORMER PRIME minister once dreamed of Australia as a nation of shareholders, enriched by their participation in the...

By Hugh Mackay

A quiet revolution

Once in a rare while the fundamental architecture of a significant part of society shifts. Over the last two...

By Cheryl Kernot

Openness, collaboration & participation

IT WAS ALWAYS a thrill to find an email from the prospective president of the free world jumping out...

By Julianne Schultz

The Ministry of Going In

This is what happensI go insweep the floorclear the dishesinterview the Secretary of State over a flat whiteand lamingtonand...

By Christine Paice

Who’s that dancing with my mother?

WE WERE LIVING in Napier at the time. My father pulled the keys down from the hook in the...

By Lloyd Jones

The real thing

OUR FAMILY'S NEVER been very good at ‘family'. When my nephew was conceived my sister and I weren't even...

By Catherine Harris