A good, clear-headed read. The biggest things I took out of it were the enormous role played by The Australian and the ACL in generating alarm and opposition re: Safe Schools, and the way the program acted as a lightning rod for much broader social concerns about gender, sexuality and children's safety, development and agency.
As an aside, even though I'm only a sporadic reader, it's pretty great that the Quarterly Essays have become such an established part of the landscape. While obviously tilted towards my own particular interests, as well as towards the periods when I was paying particular attention, the ones I've read go:
As an aside, even though I'm only a sporadic reader, it's pretty great that the Quarterly Essays have become such an established part of the landscape. While obviously tilted towards my own particular interests, as well as towards the periods when I was paying particular attention, the ones I've read go:
- Raimond Gaita on truth, morality and politics (#16, 2004) - one of the few periodicals to have survived my increasingly swingeing bookshelf culls
- Clive Hamilton on the decline (or, in his diagnosis, death) of social democracy (#21, 2006)
- Inga Clendinnen on the history wars and the relationship between history and fiction (#23, 2006)
- Peter Hartcher on how to win the 2007 election, written in early '07 (#25, 2007)
- Annabel Crabb on Malcolm Turnbull, written when he was opposition leader (#34, 2009)
- Laura Tingle on public expectations of government (#46, 2012)
- Laura Tingle (again) on the loss of institutional memory and resultant diminishment in good government (#60, 2015) - the other QE that I've held on to
