Recent publications in IPA Review article
Editorial, March 2009
Is this the biggest financial crisis since 1987? Since the 1970s? Since the Second World War? Since the Great Depression? Since the word ‘finance' was coined? Who knows - my economist can beat up your economist. Like those American political...
So where is our GasBuddy? Can't mates be buddies too?
There is a ruthless efficiency about Kevin Rudd. The man who bewailed Brutopia's coming is as ruthless as his own caricatured ‘neo-liberals' and market forces. Even more ironically, market metaphors best describe the Prime Minister's...
New world leaders and the politics of power
IPA Review | March 2009 In early 2008, David Cameron said he greatly admired Barack Obama and pledged to bring some of the same uplifting spirit of change and renewal that the American Democrat generated in the US to the British political scene....
Bailout Bonanza!
IPA Review | March 2009 Periods of economic turmoil have a habit of exposing weaknesses in policy, whether it is through inexperience, a lack of understanding, or a combination of these. Only a short twelve months ago, a newly elected Rudd...
Nixon as culture warrior
IPA Review | March 2009 Tom Switzer reviews Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (Scribner, 2008, 881 pages) Richard Milhous Nixon was born into a modest, working-class Protestant family. He worked at...
Into the mind of Buffett
IPA Review | March 2009 Michael Potter reviews The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder (Bantam, 2008, 976 pages) Warren Buffett frequently seems to be in the right place at the right time. He invests in companies...
Obama's Presidency for Dummies
IPA Review | March 2009 Scott Hargreaves reviews Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 2005, 944 pages) In selecting Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State President Obama has made history repeat itself. His historical...
A slave obeys, a player chooses
When you escaped, not long ago, from the burning wreckage of a passenger jet crashed in the middle of the Atlantic, you entered a lonely obelisk rising from the water. Inside that obelisk, a bathysphere waited to take you down to the art...
Keeping up with Kevin: Kevin Rudd's testosterone technocracy
"From time to time in human history there occur events of a truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next." If the Prime Minister's rhetoric is anything to go by, big things are brewing. He announced...
How Labor factions broke New South Wales
In the six months following the 1975 defeat of the Whitlam Government, Australia's two most populous states held elections. In Victoria, the voters re-elected a Liberal government that had been in office for 21 years; in NSW they rejected one that...