WHILE we might softly applaud this week’s call by Richard Vines, a former director of the Victorian Labor Party’s fundraising arm, Progressive Business, for greater transparency in campaign donations, his proffered reforms are wholly inadequate. In fact, the United States – hardly a bastion of electoral innovation – has something to teach us about transparency...

IN THE same month that the Guardian began publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations of secret internet surveillance in the United States and Britain, the Australian parliament passed its first comprehensive legislative protection for government whistleblowers. The coincidence inevitably raises the question: would Australia’s new laws protect Snowden’s leaks?

THE federal government claims that its new asylum seeker policy – the PNG solution – breaks the people smugglers’ business model. Anyone smuggled by boat to Australia will be removed to Papua New Guinea for processing and won’t be resettled in Australia. People smugglers will no longer be able to sell their product – the...

The Geelong Project is a place-based, ‘community of schools and youth services’ approach to early intervention using population screening, a flexible practice framework and youth-focused, family-centred case management. The model builds in longitudinal follow-up and support to reduce homelessness, and achieve sustainable education and lifetime outcomes. The model and the current project has grown out...

YOU’LL be familiar with the narrative. Lobbyists are quietly pulling all the strings in the political world. Deals are done behind closed doors, suspicious men in dark suits lurk in the corridors of power, and vested interests throw money at political parties to buy the influence they need to control what passes through parliament.