As the National Broadband Network arrives in its first release sites across Australia, it brings high expectations of the world leading investment of $40 billion. It also carries heavy political baggage.

Social innovation is an overarching term for a variety of practices that aim to address social problems, and provides a new lens to understand the role of the social in innovation. Social innovation takes the form of products, processes, services and models that meet social needs.

This topic guide examines women and work in Australia.

Australia’s clean energy legislation, while increasing costs for Australian consumers and likely to have some impacts on workers, will force large polluters to shift to cleaner technologies, particularly in the energy and transport sectors, writes Jo Coghlan.

A charge of drug trafficking becomes the first test of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights in the High Court. Fiona Chong looks at the results in this article for APO.