Category: Inside Story

Back in the 2010s, the great healthcare transformation on the horizon was precision medicine, which promised to make treatments hugely more effective by matching them to the genome, history and context of each individual. Barack Obama featured a precision medicine initiative in his 2015 State of the Union address. Precision

In what would be the most dramatic shake-up of Australian school education in half a century, former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli has called on governments to fully fund all primary schooling — Catholic, independent and public alike. Piccoli, director of UNSW’s Gonski Institute for Education, made the call as

“Buy Australian” has been the catchcry from many in politics, business, trade unions and industry bodies for as long as I can remember, and Covid-19 has upped the ante. But while many groups advocate Buy Australian, one group is conspicuously absent: economists. The reason for this is counterintuitive: Buy Australian

Is a security service essential? John Fahey, a former intelligence officer, certainly thinks so, and this belief underscores his scathing analysis of the uneven and unsuccessful efforts to develop an effective Australian security and intelligence service before 1950. The central argument of Traitors and Spies has two parts. First, that

A pandemic holds up a perfect mirror to a society and shines a light in every crack. There is no better illustration of this fact than the light Covid-19 is throwing on aged care homes in Australia and internationally. Australian aged care was already in crisis and a subject of

What’s a parliamentary opposition to do when a traumatised electorate only has eyes for, is clinging for dear life to, the people who actually wield power? When the prime minister, premier or chief minister, basking in turbocharged authority, can’t seem to put a foot wrong, even when they most surely

As Victorians go into an even more severe lockdown and the rest of the country grapples with the economic fallout of Covid-19, it may be hard to believe that any issues other than health and the economy could emerge as a major political headache for the government. But stewing away

Students in many countries have campaigned for the “decolonisation” of universities and their curricula. The debate following the death of George Floyd and the reactions against the protests have lent urgency to efforts to come to terms not only with racism but also with empire and its legacies. But what

When the iconic indigenous Brazilian leader Paulinho Paiakan died from Covid-19 in June, aged sixty-six, the pandemic was already having a significant impact on Latin American native communities. Paiakan had been hospitalised in the northcentral Amazon state of Pará, which is among the most badly affected regions of Brazil. As

Two hundred and fifty years ago this month, Captain James Cook famously staked a claim to much of this country. In an entry in his journal on 22 August 1770 he described how he and a party of men had landed on the island at the northern tip of the

As the Covid-19 pandemic set in, state and territory governments around Australia rapidly found crisis accommodation — usually in hotels — for around 7000 people who were sleeping rough. But the impressive speed and resolve raised a difficult question: what happens next? A return to business as usual would mean

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but not when the picture was distributed by the American military after the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. As Lesley Blume writes in Fallout, the following day’s newspaper reports had to make do with government-supplied