Peter Saunders analyses how the welfare state might be transformed to give ordinary people more control over key areas of their lives which are currently managed for them by the government. Saunders demonstates that, to a large extent, we no longer need the welfare state. Most people could afford to buy most of the services...

The Commonwealth Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, has suggested that the federal government assume full legal responsibility for universities. Andrew Norton argues that transferring power over universities from the states to the Commonwealth would be a mistake. Centralising decisionmaking in Canberra would put key decisions in the hands of the government most deaf to feedback, with...

Since the 1970s, Australia has been conducting a utopian socialist experiment with the lives of a generation of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote Australia. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin argue that the resulting deprivation and misery of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities can no longer be tolerated by wider Australia. New...

The intense debate over the war in Iraq and American foreign policy has raised age-old questions about the rights and wrongs of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, the pre-emptive use of force and the 'export' of democracy, but there has been little attempt to acknowledge and confront the special difficulties of discussing...

Caspar Conde criticises the way governments are increasingly legislating and regulating with a view to minimising all risks, no matter how small. It seems that whenever there is a problem, the government assumes that it has a duty to solve it. But even when it is well-intentioned, this increasing scale of government intervention erodes personal...