In The Best Australian Political Writing 2009, Crikey publisher Eric Beecher selects the most incisive and entertaining writing about the notable events and names of the past year. From the Prime Minister's historic apology speech and the global financial crisis to the election of the first black American President, it has been an era-defining twelve months. Leading political commentators chart these momentous times and look at the issues that have divided the country - climate change, leadership contests, the Bill Henson controversy and more.

This groundbreaking book examines why the majority of Australian school leavers want to go to university and have resisted government attempts to promote alternative forms of tertiary education. The New Inheritors explores differences in young people’s understanding of the purpose of university and their reasons for wanting to enrol. The book reveals that although there has been a general shift in values towards the utilitarian perspective, there is still significant support for the traditional liberal idea of university education as a cultural experience. This support is concentrated in well-educated families, regardless of their financial resources, but there is a substantial number of young people from less well-educated families who have absorbed the liberal perspective. The book begins with an extensive and unique overview of changes in Australian federal government tertiary education policy and changes in the public discourse on education. This overview provides a framework against which differences among today’s students are examined in detail. Drawing on a study of over 200 secondary school students from diverse backgrounds The New Inheritors records their attitudes to university – including access, fees and the role of government – and explores how these are formed by their family backgrounds and influenced by public policy on education. The New Inheritors uncovers the complexity of young people’s attitudes, and what processes occur in the forming and reforming of those attitudes to university and what young people really want from university education. Dr Madeleine Mattarozzi Laming is a Lecturer in Education at Australian Catholic University. She has given numerous conference papers on transition from school to university and teaching students from diverse backgrounds. In 2011 she received an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation for an outstanding contribution to student learning, particularly at the first year.

Given the rising criticisms of and growing doubts about globalisation, this timely edited volume looks at globalisation and its economic impact on eight countries in Asia and the Pacific region, namely Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, the United States (US), and Vietnam. The eight selected countries are members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and yet the economies of these member countries have benefited differently from globalisation. This book summarises findings from existing academic literature in a coherent framework and reviews them critically to provide a balanced analysis. It also identifies the mechanisms through which globalisation impacts economies and explains how understanding of such mechanisms can be useful for formulating policies, which would benefit from globalisation while achieving inclusive economic growth in the context of rising nationalism and protectionism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/10.4324/9781003138501, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This year's Best Australian Essays ranges far and wide. There are portraits of Michael Jackson, Samuel Beckett, the kookaburra, Julia Gillard and Charles Darwin. There are dazzling pieces on commerce and cricket, extinction and translation, perfume and politics. There are journeys through landscapes scorched and recovering, and reflections on tu...

This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity. This book considers how these threats are encountered and countered in the urban age, focusing on the issue of human knowledge and self-awareness, just as Hannah Arendt’s influential The Human Condition did half a century ago. The Human Condition is now The Urban Condition. And it is this condition that will define human prospects in an age of default and risk. Gleeson expertly explores the concept through three main themes. The first is an exploration of what defines the current human condition, especially the expanding cities that are at the heart of an over-consumptive world economic order. The second exposes and reviews the reawakening of forms of knowledge (‘naturalism’) that are likely to worsen not improve our comprehension of the crisis. The new ‘science of urbanism’ in popular new literature exemplifies this dangerous trend. The third and last part of the book considers prospects for a new urban, and therefore human, dispensation, ‘The Good City’. We must first journey in our urban vessels through troubled times. But can we now start to plot the way to new shores, to a safer, more resilient city that provides for human flourishing? The Urban Condition attempts this ideal, conceiving a new urbanism based on the old idea of self-limitation. The Urban Condition is an original, timely book that reconsiders and redeploys Arendt’s famous notion of The Human Condition in an age of cities and risk. It brings together several important strands of human consideration, urbanisation, climate threat, resource depletion, economic default and critical knowledge and weaves them into a new analysis of the times. It also looks to a future that is nearly with us—of changed climate, resource scarcity and economic stress. The book journeys into these troubled times, proposing the idea of Lifeboat Cities as a way of thinking about the human journey to come

In The Purpose of Futility, Clare Rhoden surveys Australian Great War narratives, demonstrating their particularly Australian features which help to explain the unique and disputed position of the Great War in Australian history.--Provided by publisher