Category: Inside Story

I first met Oriel Gray in 1995 when, tape recorder in hand, I visited her at her home in West Heidelberg, Melbourne. I was a PhD student, eager and nervous to be meeting one of the women I was researching for my thesis on Australian women playwrights of the mid-twentieth

As the United States gets closer to an unusually divisive election potentially followed by months of distracting disputation, will China take the immense gamble of trying to invade Taiwan, or at least strangle it into submission? If so, Australia may suddenly face the moment when it has to “choose” between

There was a time when Madeleine Albright flew the world on her own jumbo jet, communing with presidents and prime ministers. But now, after a long overnight flight to Heathrow airport, the former US secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations is queuing as a tired, private citizen,

Whether it’s Australia’s exports, imports, tourists, migrants, international students or investment, it seems like all roads lead to China. China accounts for a whopping 8 per cent of Australia’s GDP based on merchandise exports alone, more than our entire construction sector. It accounts for 40 per cent of our merchandise

The Greens had luck running their way. Sometimes everything just comes together: you play the perfect game, cook the perfect meal or make the perfect coffee. In the ACT, the Greens just had the perfect election. They went in aspiring to treble their representation from two members to six in

Thanks to new rules and deft moderating by Kristen Welker, the second presidential debate was nowhere near the debacle of the first, but it still did little to enlighten viewers about the policies and programs each candidate would take into their presidency next year. Like tigers, Trump hasn’t changed his

Twelve days from the presidential election, leading American polling analysts at FiveThirtyEight give Joe Biden a ten percentage point lead over Donald Trump, 52.1–42.2. The other leading aggregator, RealClearPolitics, has the race somewhat closer, 50.6–43.0, giving Biden a still-comfortable lead of just under eight points. Neither site has detected anything

A crisis is hovering behind the scenes of Victoria’s much-anticipated release from pandemic lockdown. In suburbs around Melbourne, the longed-for announcement that businesses and retail can reopen is expected to trigger the eviction from their homes of over one hundred refugees and people seeking asylum, who have been living in

Josh Frydenberg didn’t have a good election last year. For only the second time since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1946, the federal treasurer’s pedigreed Melbourne electorate of Kooyong returned a primary vote below 50 per cent. (The first occasion was in 1972.) There were several reasons: a

In an interview when her book Bad Faith was published in 2007, Australian-born Carmen Callil — now Dame Carmen Callil for her services to literature — spoke about being scared. She claimed to have been scared when she started Virago, arguably the first and the premier feminist publishing house in

For the tenth year in a row, the Australian National Audit Office, the agency that brought us the sports rorts affair and revealed that the federal government had massively overpaid for land in Western Sydney, had its funding cut in the federal budget. The ANAO is not alone. Government funding

“I’m sitting in a building here that was built for 5000 people… and there are probably six in it today,” National Australia Bank CEO Ross McEwan told me recently during a parliamentary committee hearing. But there’s more: according to the bank’s surveys, four-fifths of staff members don’t want to return