The ANU's Brendan McCaffrie discusses a way of removing partisan bias from the formulation of Australia's electoral laws. His proposal for an Independent Electoral Law Committee seeks to remove the partisan influence of the major parties from electoral law-making. Although the major parties may be loath to give up this control, there are international precedents...

The election of a new government means an opportunity to fix some of the things that have been going wrong with Australia’s electoral system. Australia has been making it harder to enrol and vote, and easier for private money to influence electoral outcomes. Read the Audit's priorities for electoral reform.

With the Rudd government looking at making changes to the Electoral Act, Peter Brent places automatic enrolment as a high priority. In this paper, he highlights the mass of database information which the Australian Electoral Commission has access to, but cannot efficiently use for updating the electoral roll. Brent calls for the AEC to be...

Emma Dawson assesses the state of SBS as a public broadcaster reflecting the concerns of ethnic Australia. Dawson discusses how SBS management has responded to being caught up in the culture wars, attempting to adequately respond to the interests of its viewers, and its political masters.

This paper focuses on the actual experience of housing affordability, revealing how deeply the problem cuts into the financial and general wellbeing of renters.