State of the Nation

The space for broad-based discourse is shrinking. In its place, we have siloed online communities ...

What’s a literary journal for? ...

Change is slow. And Australia is even slower. This is a central crisis of the colonised nation-state ...

As a nation, we are quite selective in what we remember and what we forget ...

Whitlam, for his faults, refused to yield on progressive ideals. Instead of celebrating what he achieved, we treat it as a cautionary tale ...

More than fifty years ago, Gough Whitlam used heroic advocacy to change Australian society. We must follow his example ...

The word ‘woke’ is tiresome. More though, it’s a cliché that terminates our ability to debate. In Australian civic discourse, and internationally, the word is used to demarcate lines of battle. In 2025, Australian politicians are hoping it can turn ...

Writing a piece on the energy in the Trump administration is like trying to write fiction in the apocalypse: you can’t create anything more insane than the real world. Every time I write about something batshit they are up to, ...

I am in a constant state of disappointment. I am disappointed in myself for not completing this task or that. I am disappointed in my children, for similar reasons. I am disappointed in old friends for their fading politics. Mostly ...

It was not Anthony Albanese’s beach house we resented, but the intergenerational inequity his government is unwilling to address. ‘As a prime minister, I earn a good income. I understand that I’ve been fortunate. But I also understand what it’s ...

There is always an appetite. It is now the gambling corporations that seek to mould everyone in their own image. They might yet be reined in ...

Universities are public institutions, not corporations. They exist for the public good ...

Since becoming a parent, how I interact with ‘the arts’ has changed. With two children under four, it has become more demanding and participatory ...

Eight weeks before the 2016 federal election, a turd dropped on prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s doorstep. It came not from a rival politician or an opposition campaign but from the plush corridors of the Productivity Commission. In a draft report ...

It has been bewildering to observe the reaction to ABC journalist Laura Tingle’s unremarkable observation that Australia is ‘a racist country ... we always have been.' ...