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Inside Story | Current affairs and culture

• Politics & policy


• Marginalised by the marginals
• 28 July 2010

• It’s the focus on marginal seats that is excluding most of us from the election conversation, writes Norman Abjorensen, but that doesn’t mean the issues are straightforward


• Howard’s victories: which voters switched, which issues mattered, and why
• 23 July 2010

• The reasons for the Howard government’s electoral success are widely misunderstood, write Murray Goot and Ian Watson, and we can see the impact in the current campaign


• Back to schools
• 23 July 2010

• Schools policy is back on the election agenda, writes Ben Eltham. But will it lead to substantial reform?

• Media


• The copyright cops
• 15 July 2010

• When it comes to the prices they pay for copyrighted music, Australian consumers are being stung everywhere from the gym to the pub, writes Ben Eltham


• Nine-tenths of the law
• 03 June 2010

• Sydney’s media moguls took off the gloves on a winter’s night in 1960 – and the Packers lost, writes Rodney Tiffen


• The scandal that almost wasn’t
• 25 May 2010

• Why did most of the media run dead on the Securency bribery story, asks Peter Browne

• Essays & reportage


• The rising tide of border security
• 28 July 2010

• Border security has complex effects, many of them unanticipated, some of them pernicious and potentially destabilising, and some of them irreversible, writes Peter Chambers


• Drug companies take a dip
• 14 July 2010

• When GlaxoSmithKline announced a series of initiatives to improve access to drugs in least-developed countries, its most radical proposal was for a “patent pool” to generate research into neglected diseases. Meanwhile, Unitaid was designing its own pool, focused on AIDS research. In Nairobi Xan Rice looks at progress on the two pools and GSK’s other proposals


• Two-up, one down
• 07 July 2010

• The law seemed to fail Boonie Hilt, a thirty-six year old Aboriginal man, but there were small victories along the way, writes Gillian Cowlishaw

• The Americas


• García’s Peru
• 21 July 2010

• Australia’s embassy is reopening in Lima because Peru’s internal conflict is considered to be over. But the impact of the violence lives on, writes Elizabeth Bryer


• “Justice came late, but it came”
• 05 July 2010

• The world’s largest trial for crimes against humanity is exhuming Argentina’s era of state terrorism, murder and torture. It is a trial with global resonance, writes Antonio Castillo


• Obama’s America
• 12 June 2010

• Change the government and you change the country, Paul Keating once said. But eighteen months into his first term, how much has Barack Obama’s America really changed, asks Dennis Altman

• Reviews


• Arguing for peace
• 22 July 2010

• DOCUMENTARY | Sylvia Lawson reviews Hope in a Slingshot, which isn’t to be screened on the ABC


• Flashpoint
• 13 July 2010

• BOOKS | Norman Abjorensen reviews Mary Heimann’s revisionist history of Prague


• Hollywood economics
• 13 July 2010

• BOOKS | Ben Goldsmith reviews Edward Jay Epstein’s compelling behind-the-scenes account of how money moves in Hollywood

• Europe


• Party patriotism
• 18 July 2010

• The World Cup is over, but it left a tentatively flag-waving Germany divided and unsettled, writes Daniel Nethery in Berlin


• Peace or ceasefire?
• 01 July 2010

• Is the thaw in relations between Poland and Russia sustainable? The Polish presidential election campaign and recent trends in Russian foreign policy highlight the key factors in play, writes John Besemeres


• A dawning realisation
• 23 June 2010

• The new British government began slashing spending this week. Meanwhile, Labour is left with the problem of defining what it stands for, writes Frank Bongiorno

• Podcasts


• “If you can reach that point of almost nonchalance in playing, that’s a different level of creativity again”
• 30 June 2010

• John Bell talks to Peter Clarke about acting, King Lear and the Bell Shakespeare Company


• Digging up a scandal
• 18 June 2010

• The story of how two journalists unearthed the Securency scandal shows what would be lost if newspapers stop funding investigative journalism. They talked to Peter Clarke

• From the archive


• Will Robin Hood ride again?
• 26 March 2010

• Pressure is growing for a small but potentially very effective global financial transactions tax. But where is Australia in the debate, asks Ross Buckley


• We aren’t refugees
• 30 June 2009

• For people on Kiribati and Tuvalu facing increasing climate pressures, the description “refugee” has too many negative connotations, write Jane McAdam and Maryanne Loughry

• The economy


• Reclaiming our financial sectors
• 22 June 2010

• The Australian government should swing its support behind the growing international campaign for a banking levy, writes Ross Buckley, and then it should join the push for a financial transactions tax


• Euclidean economics
• 16 March 2010

• Kelvin Rowley profiles the leading figure in postwar economics, Paul Samuelson

• Asia & the Pacific


• The US reads the riot act to Pakistan
• 29 July 2010

• Will Pakistan continue its longstanding policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, asks Sandy Gordon


• New Zealand pushes ahead with ETS-lite
• 07 July 2010

• New Zealand’s new emissions trading scheme is far from ideal, but at least it’s a first step, writes Norm Kelly

• Africa & the Middle East


• Gaza: symbol and flashpoint
• 10 June 2010

• Can the Obama administration, bogged down in Afghanistan, rise to the challenge, asks Sumantra Bose


• A taste of democracy on the Nile
• 06 May 2010

• Amid preparations for Sudan’s controversial election last month, Xan Rice met a Sudanese man from Sydney who was looking well beyond election day