The Kazakh president thought he’d been palmed off with second-rate visitors, but the vice-regal Australians eventually got under his guard ...

“You who are seated here today will be China’s elites tomorrow,” declared the middle-aged party secretary at my senior high school. Alongside hundreds of other first-year students at one of the top ...

Books & arts Dispirited voters Glyn Davis 30 October 2025 Political dejection creates disengaged citizens, says a new synthesis of psychology, sociology and political science ...

Books & arts Boulez at 100, the Proms at 130 Andrew Ford 24 July 2025 This year’s BBC Proms celebrate composer, conductor and audience favourite Pierre Boulez Books & arts “That’s all I can do” Andrew ...

Essays & reportage Nuclear Australia: an on-again, off-again history Jessica Urwin 11 April 2025 Is Peter Dutton’s energy plan going the way of a succession of nuclear pushes?

Nations are built with pens and brushes not just hammers and nails. They exhibit their character in what they say about themselves as much as what is said about them. — Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground ...

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 93 per cent of children attend public schools. In Alberta, the province that topped Canada for reading and science in the latest round of OECD tests, ...

Australian schooling lives within the comprehensive failure of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s “education revolution.” David Gonski’s proposals, by some margin the best of a bad lot, had only limited ...

Two hundred years after the birth of Karl Marx and fifty years after the last Western upsurge of revolutionary ferment in 1968, the term “monopoly capitalism” might seem like a relic of outmoded ...

After months of public brinkmanship, with interest groups and commentators barracking from the sidelines and the threat of a double dissolution election hanging overhead, the federal government has ...

In November 2017 a group of protesters in São Paulo burnt an effigy of acclaimed gender theorist Judith Butler outside an academic conference she was attending, while waving crucifixes and national ...