Journal
Articles
Active citizens, constructive answers
IN THE DAYS after Labor’s unexpected defeat at the May 2019 federal election, a social media storm raged. ‘What...
Remembering who you report to
EARLY IN MY career as a Queensland public servant, I attended a workshop with the renowned Professor Patrick Weller,...
Towards a reconception of power
IT WOULD BE disconcerting to wake up one day and discover that everything we thought was real in the...
Negotiating the grey zone
WHILE SUCCESSIVE AUSTRALIAN governments spent the past decade focused on their budget deficits, another deficit quietly opened: one of...
Co-operation, mutualisation, innovation
THE MURMURED ANTIPHONY of counsels assisting, witnesses and the commissioner that fills the bulk of any public hearing is...
‘Imagine us as part of you’
LIKE MOST VISITS to ‘the future’ of anything, the wonders of a trip to Australia’s most advanced digital hospital...
Truth, lies and diplomacy
IN 1604, SIR Henry Wotten – an English diplomat travelling through Augsburg – composed an epigram for the guest...
Signing up to the social contract
AMONG THE MOST lovely and quirky of the books I own is a hardback compendium called The Book of...
Weaponising privilege
Even then, ‘the strip’ was a parody of itself. But the Cross was still an idea, a state of mind. It was a place of organised crime, corrupt police, exploitation, inequality and violence – but it was also a place to find likeminded people, to escape judgment. Which is what makes the story of reform here so extraordinary – vulnerable people who gathered together to seek acceptance ended up working together for survival, liberation and change. Harm minimisation was shaped by a crisis that ultimately engendered credibility and resolve. From those beginnings, it continues to grow.
Bashar al-Assad
I asked her to draw her home for me Ben Quilty Using the old cryptographs Heba, at the age of six, has managed...
Hail Hydra
‘DO YOU TRUST me?’ An earnest question. ‘I do.’ An earnest answer. And then that ancient, global gesture of earnest intimacy:...
The compound
A TROPICAL SUMMER. 2006: A Monday. Wendy, the story: the compound, the day, her telling me in Mackay her...
