Books & arts Democracy on the ropes? Klaus Neumann 15 December 2025 Liberal democracy is being assailed by far-right populists and autocrats. Who’s coming to its rescue?

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 93 per cent of children attend public schools. In Alberta, the province that topped Canada for reading and science in the latest round of OECD tests, ...

Nations are built with pens and brushes not just hammers and nails. They exhibit their character in what they say about themselves as much as what is said about them. — Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground ...

THE story of the devastation of the NSW Labor Party in 2011 begins on the night of one of its more miraculous victories. On Saturday 24 March 2007, the premier, Morris Iemma – whose government had ...

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, the world’s attention has focused on what quickly became a grinding war of attrition, with its endless drone and missile ...

In recent years, as a historian of Australia, I’ve found that the book people most wanted to talk to me about is Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. Many readers speak of it with a sense of astonishment and ...

With a few exceptions (including Andrew Leigh, Nicki Hutley and Angela Jackson) mainstream Australian economists — including me — haven’t thought, spoken or written as much about the causes and ...

The world’s highest court has just given the Australian government a giant climate headache. For all the rhetorical, political and practical support Australia offers the small Pacific island ...

Australia was born urban and quickly became suburban. Almost as quickly, the idea of the suburb – the location of the Great Australian Dream – began to attract its enemies, here and across the Western ...

For almost a decade the Coalition government insisted the states and territories had sole responsibility for ensuring that Australians on the lowest incomes had a place to call home. Even at the ...

Global governance is a tricky thing at the best of times. As the United Nations turns eighty, its charter’s opening words — “We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding ...

“I cannot live with You —” goes Emily Dickinson’s poem. “It would be Life —/ And Life is over there —/ Behind the Shelf.” Once upon a time many Australian homes had the books of Patrick White out ...