People & associates
Chris Berg
Submission to Australian Law Reform Commission National Classification Scheme Review
Submission to Australian Law Reform Commission National Classification Scheme Review
China under Mao - What we know now and what we should have known then
There's no longer an excuse for any illusions about the horrors of China under Mao Zedong. Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China at the...
Has Australian Democracy Become Too Conservative?
Has Australian Democracy Become Too Conservative? A speech given at the ACCESS Annual Debate, 15 November 2010 If Australian democracy is getting too conservative what does that mean? In a speech just before her death, the radical freedom novelist...
The Impact and Cost of Health Sector Regulation
Every Australian deserves the opportunity to access high quality health care services. Those services should improve quality of life while remaining affordable. Increasingly however, Australia's health system is bowing under the weight of a...
The 'divine violence' of Slavoj Zizek
Nearly half a century after 1968, Europe is again seized by sporadic outbursts of anarchic, seemingly-purposeless violence. The extraordinary violence in Greece brought about by that country's sovereign debt crisis is both unfocused and...
Editorial, March 2010
'People have been saying for a while now that what we need is a book industry plan', said the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr in a speech in mid-February. ‘No one is going to ghost it for...
From the Rum Corps to the alcopop
In the special episode of ABC TV's Q&A in February this year, Kevin Rudd was asked whether he would like to raise the drinking age to 21: ‘of course'. Rudd quickly backed away from that definitive statement when the audience responded...
Editorial, December 2009
You don't need an opinion about climate science-nor any opinion about the ‘need' for action on carbon dioxide emissions-to observe that political action on a national or global scale will be totally futile to achieve the ambitious...
Climategate: What we've learned so far
The exposure of thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is one of the biggest developments in the climate change debate for the last ten years. The emails-now dubbed...
20 Years On: Western liberty and Soviet tyranny
2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall-the moment which signalled the end of the short and brutal totalitarian 20th century. The movement had actually begun much earlier. The disintegration of Communist rule in Hungary...