Cape York Institute senior policy adviser, Shireen Morris, told the ABC’s ‘Q&A’ program recently that the incarceration rate of Indigenous people has doubled since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody twenty-five years ago. That statement is true, but gaps in the data suggest the problem may be even worse than the official statistics...

Four years after its announcement, the Queensland government last week cancelled the central plank in the Logan Renewal Initiative: the overhaul of Logan’s 4,900 public housing dwellings by a community-housing-provider-led consortium. The initiative is a planned 20-year strategy to reshape Logan, an outer-suburban centre in Brisbane’s southeast. It would have been Australia’s largest and most-ambitious...

Australia, like every nation, must define its interests in a realistic way, in line with its core values, domestic priorities and financial resources. Australia’s national interest lies first and foremost in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as in key relationships with bilateral allies. However, Australia’s current public-policy space is too small to grapple with the...

Dealing with refugee flows requires sophisticated policies that reflect both domestic and international realities. These realities include Australia’s status as a sovereign nation that wishes to protect its borders, but also as a country operating in a highly globalised world. That world is experiencing situations of protracted armed conflict and large numbers of refugees. The...

Australia’s schools are not keeping up with the best in the world. There is a real problem, and governments must act. But the newly elected Coalition government must tread a fine line: good Commonwealth policy will not save Australia’s schools, but poor policy will damage them further. A big challenge for any Commonwealth education minister...