The free speech debate has been marked by selectivity and score-settling Acres of ink and gigaloads of bytes have been spilled in recent times over “free speech.” Sadly, the debate has mostly been self-serving. Much of it has been driven by right-wing voices opposed both to vilification laws and to a now-defunct proposal to strengthen...

What happens when you add a hypothetical to a hypothetical? Why does the Australian media publish opinion polls week-in, week-out, all year, every year, no matter how far away the next election is? And why are they studied, discussed and obsessed over…? Read the full article

Newly released documents reveal the intelligence community in the early 1970s through the eyes of a former senior bureaucrat

Spatial concentrations of socially and economically disadvantaged people, particularly in large cities, have been the subject of considerable policy debates in Australia over the past 30 years. A variety of terms have been used in these debates including: urban poverty, locational disadvantage, socio-economic disadvantage, social exclusion and concentrations of welfare dependency.

Has feckless Australia set itself up for a post-boom slump? Two new books see the prospects quite differently In June 1853, Karl Marx wrote a dispatch for the New York Daily Tribune under the title “Revolution in China and Europe.” Written in the teeth of recent defeats – Marx had described the Parisian uprising in...