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Two decades since it was claimed that class is dead, social, economic, and cultural inequalities are rising. Though Australia is often described as a 'lucky country' with a strong economy, we are witness to intensifying inequality with entrenched poverty and the growth of precarious and insecure labour. The disconnect of the rusted-on Labor voter and the rise of far-right politics suggest there is an urgent need to examine the contemporary functions of class relations. At a time of deepening inequality, Class in Australia brings together a range of new and original research for a timely examination of class relations, labour exploitation, and the changing formations of work in contemporary Australian society.

The era was by turns fab, groovy, cool, far out, way-out, hip, boss, outta sight, right-on and a blast, man: enough to make everyone freak out!

On the eve of the Great War in 1914, the Australian Federal Government sponsored the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) to travel to Australia for their annual conference. Over 150 scientists were fully funded by the Australian Commonwealth government and they travelled on three ships especially commanded for this purpose. Across five major cities, public talks, demonstrations, and excursions familiarised the visiting scientists with Australian natural and hard sciences, geology, botany, as well as anthropology. In terms of anthropology, the congress presented a unique opportunity to showcase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. The Association, deeply impressed by this, urged the Federal Government to support a chair in anthropology to be based at an Australian university. Other outcomes included the Association's recommendations to establish a Commonwealth Scientific Institute (later CSIRO) and to develop a national telescope at Mt Stromlo. Although these were delayed by the outbreak of WWI, it is clear that this Trip to the Dominions was no mere singular event, but rather left a legacy we are still beneficiaries of today.

Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History examines how genocide is remembered and represented in both popular and scholarly memory, integrating scholarship on the Holocaust with the study of other genocides through a comparative framework. Scholars from a range of disciplines re-evaluate narratives of past conflict to explore how memory of genocide is mobilised in the aftermath, tracing the development and evolution of memory through the lenses of national identities, colonialism, legal history, film studies, gender, the press, and literary studies.

What is it about the culture and structure of Parliament House that has allowed sexual violence and harassment to flourish? Since the mid-1990s, the number of women in the Australian Parliament has increased, but unfortunately, they are still not being heard. And tragically, they are not always safe. As women, we believe in the power of politics to do good, and as feminists we recognise that politics is about power: getting it, holding onto it, and using it to improve citizens' lives. Women wielding power in Parliament House, women fighting for equality and an end to discrimination across our country, have made their mark and they have caused change. But the underlying problem of men's attitudes towards women, of men believing it is their right to assault or harass women, remains. For this to change, men will have to give up some of the harmful ways in which they use power--in the parliament and in our community. We are calling for actions to have consequences, and for an end to a culture of political impunity. We want to seize this moment to do the unfinished work--to make sure that women are not just in the room, but that they are safe there. We say enough is enough.

When Héritier Lumumba's Collingwood teammates called him 'Chimp', it showed a lack of respect. When the Prime Minister referred to Brittany Higgins by her first name in parliament, it showed a lack of respect. When senator Bill Heffernan referred to then prime minister Julia Gillard as 'deliberately barren', it showed a lack of respect. When the federal government refused permission to fly the Indigenous flag in the Senate, it showed a lack of respect. When Bettina Arndt defended a 56-year-old man who had repeatedly raped fifteen-year-old Grace Tame, now the 2021 Australian of the Year, it showed a lack of respect. So when did respect disappear? When did we agree to abandon our respect for expertise, for other people's experience and history, for the boundaries between the personal and the public, for facts as well as feelings? In a civil society, respect is a fundamental principle. Should the government of the day legislate respect? Should it lead the community or follow it? Victorian MP Jill Hennessy, in a passionate argument, exhorts us to reclaim the empathy that respect depends on.

Long-term population directions, in terms of both size and age composition, drive the destiny of all nations. While for decades we have worried about global overpopulation, it is far more likely that the period 1950-2050 will be an extraordinary population growth shock, culminating in severe population ageing and then decline. This shock will have four stages aligned with the stages of the life cycle of the baby boomers: childhood, adulthood, old age and death.Around ten years ago, the developed world as a whole entered the third stage of the population shock - old age. Over the next ten to twenty years, most of continental Europe, China, Russia and South Korea will join Japan as nations with sharply declining populations. The world and modern capitalism have never before been in such a situation.While Australia's population will continue to grow over the next forty years, we will age significantly. Economic growth will slow, government and household debt will rise, and inequality will accelerate. Against that background, how will government chart our population and economic future? --

"One in five Australian women has been the victim of a sexual assault. For these women, there is less than a 1 per cent chance that their rapist has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted of the crime. These are the bare numerical facts of system failure. We offer rape survivors a stark choice: go to the police, or remain silent. In recent times, the public pressure on survivors to report has increased, alongside a growing focus on two other options: civil action against the perpetrator, or going public. These evolving social responses are intended to offer an alternative to the tradition of silencing. However, each of these choices, for survivors, involves a further sacrifice of what they have already lost. The legal system's responses to rape were designed without survivors in mind, and they do not address, in any way, the questions that survivors ask or the needs they express. Simply put, on the systemic response to rape, we are having the wrong conversation."--

Over the past thirty years, the Internet has transformed virtually every area of human activity, social and economic. The bulk of these changes have been positive, allowing people to work, imagine and connect with each other in new ways. The boost to economic activity has been enormous. But along with the benefits have come new risks. Our children can learn and play on the internet, but they can also be bullied there, or unwittingly stumble across extreme pornography. For ordinary citizens, the Internet provides an unprecedented opportunity to comment and participate in public discourse; but the same digital platforms providing this opportunity can also be forums for the wide circulation of abusive, defamatory or grossly inaccurate material. And while the Internet has created vast new opportunities for businesses and consumers, it has disrupted many traditional forms of economic activity. The result is a rich set of policy challenges for governments.--from the publisher.

The revelations and allegations of sexual harassment and assault in the Australian Parliament have prompted furious responses. Political leaders have attempted to limit the damage by referring to the lack of criminal charges, resisting a discussion of entrenched misogyny. Advocates for survivors of abuse see this as a continuation of the long history of normalising the abuse of woman, perpetuating it through legal mechanisms and the exercise of power. This impasse represents the workings of a 'rape culture' where the abuse of women is accepted as commonplace. Psychological theories of repression have been misused, contributing to the recycling of the so-called theory of 'false memories' whereby the recall of trauma is seen as invented, perhaps implanted by therapists. It is concerning that this complex issue is being ventilated by journalists, politicians, and lawyers without any clinical understanding of trauma, memory, and the implications for support. Women must not be represented as mentally unstable, untrustworthy, or ruled by their hormones while their abusers take refuge in legalisms, obfuscations, and the dark art of political calculus.

How much do you know about the history of Australia's oldest political party, the Australian Labor Party? You know the big names: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. But what about the names behind the big names? The unsung and overlooked True Believers who have been the backbone of the Labor Party for 130 years? In Labor People, Chris Bowen investigates the stories of six great Australians, passionate servants of their party. Spanning the 1890s to the 1970s, in paying tribute to these Labor warriors he also tells an important part of the history of Labor and Australia. Who was the first loyal deputy and lynchpin of the earliest Labor governments? Which leading advocate of votes for women went on to play an important but unrecognised role in Australia's literary history? Who did Labor turn to in its darkest First World War hours when its very existence was under threat? Who did Curtin and Chifley turn to for their hardest jobs? Which Labor loyalist called her own party out on police brutality when it wasn't fashionable? Which minister was Whitlam's steadiest performer? The answers to all these questions and more lie in the pages of Labor People.

Australia has been directly involved in the nuclear industry for more than a century, but our involvement has never been comprehensively documented. Long Half-life tells the social and political history of Australia's role, from the first discovery of radioactive ores in 1906 to contemporary contentious questions. Should the next generation of submarines be nuclear powered? Can nuclear energy help to slow global climate change? Do we need nuclear weapons for defence? Should we store radioactive waste from nuclear power stations in our region? Long Half-life is a timely and riveting account of the political, social and scientific complexities of the nuclear industry, revealing the power of vested interests, the subjectivities of scientists and the transformative force of community passion.

The exposés in early 2021 of sexism and sexual violence in Parliament House prompted women across the country (and some men) to take to stages, lecterns and social media to express their rage and demand action. However, while these events highlighted that violence against women is an ongoing issue in our community, in many ways the allegations and incidents should not shock us. They are part of women's daily lives. Violence against women has been called the 'shadow pandemic'; it is certainly an international epidemic. Since family violence was declared a national emergency here in 2015, little has been done nationally to change the tragic reality that one woman is killed by a current or former male partner every week. The lack of federal leadership and action can no longer be ignored, excused or explained away. Canberra's silence on violence against women has become deafening of late. The softly-softly response to allegations of abuse, harassment and sexual violence reflects a longstanding pattern of our political leaders not taking women's safety seriously. In Our National Shame, Kate Fitz-Gibbon reminds us that violence against women is not a private issue that needs bespoke, case-by-case solutions. It is a community-wide problem that, to be properly addressed, requires a dramatic shift in how we understand and respond to men's violence, and most importantly, the tackling of gender inequality in this country. Transformative national leadership must drive this. But do our political masters have either the will or the integrity to meet this challenge?

Why does Australia go through cycles of public policy boldness and timidity? The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the Australian political system has much more tolerance for policy innovation than appeared to be the case on the evidence of the previous twenty years. As another election approaches, though, the signs are that both major parties are keen for a return to policy caution. In Who Dares Loses: Pariah Policies, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen explain the political constraints on policymakers and the ways in which they are changing. This book also suggests alternative sources of revenue and spending reforms. In addition, it examines the limited debates over welfare, Medicare, and public broadcasting. Some of these ideas have been around for decades. Others are the product of new technology. What they have in common is that they are good ideas that have become pariahs when it comes to government action.

In Australia, corruption spends public funds in pursuit of power, rewards favour, and strips support from worthy programs. It silences journalists and those charged with upholding standards of integrity by depriving them of funding. Grift and stacking are commonplace as those chasing influence infiltrate the structures of power. Corruption rewards loyalty through appointments to office and by preferencing those within the favoured network ahead of others of equal or greater talent. It conceals itself through unfit-for-purpose access to information laws and processes, vague budget commitments, the assertion of unchecked executive discretion, a quick media cycle, and overburdened parliamentary committees. It undermines trust in government at a time when trust is vital to keeping us safe. Corruption allows mistrust to fester, offers nourishment to conspiracy theories, and engenders civil unrest. In Easy Lies & Influence, Fiona McLeod, a practising Senior Counsel and Chair of the Accountability Round Table, tells us what corruption can do, and why it's imperative that we address it.

"Fatal Contact explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted diseases swept through the Indigenous populations of the continent well into the twentieth century. The consequences still echo today in Aboriginal health and life expectancy. Many historians have acknowledged that introduced diseases caused much sickness and mortality among the Aboriginal populations and were part of the huge population decline following colonisation. But few writers have elaborated further, and much of this history is still missing, even after more than 200 years. Our knowledge and understanding of the biological consequences surrounding the meeting and contact of these two cultures has not yet been fully investigated. Fatal Contact examines the major epidemics and explains the complexities of disease infection and immunology: which diseases were responsible for the Aboriginal population decline across Australia in the colonial period, when and where did they occur, how severe where they, how long did they last, which diseases were more devastating, and why were they so devastating? The book also considers the individual medical history of Truganini, the Tasmanian Aboriginal woman erroneously known as 'the Last Tasmanian'. By focusing on the disease burden she faced during her life, the author creates a deeper and personal understanding of how First Nation Australians suffered and yet survived. What this investigation reveals is nothing short of the greatest human tragedy in the long history of Australia. This is a vitally important story that all Australians should read"--Publisher's description

The post-digital publishing paradigm offers authors, readers, publishers, and scholars the opportunity to engage with the production and circulation of the book (in all its forms) beyond the conventional boundaries and binaries of the pre-digital and digital eras. Post-Digital Book Cultures: Australian Perspectives is a collection of scholarly writing that examines these opportunities, from a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches, with the aim of engaging with the questions that define post-digital book cultures beyond the role of e-books. Examinations of digital publishing in the literary field can often be characterised as either narratives of decline or narratives of revolution. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, what has become clear is that neither of these approaches accurately encapsulate the role of 'the digital' on contemporary publishing practice. Rather than upending book publishing culture, the emergence of digital technologies and platforms in the field has complicated and recontextualised the production, circulation, and consumption of books.

At the height of the Victorian gold rush, between July 1852 and June 1853, hundreds of government-assisted migrants from Lancashire, England made their way to Australia and disembarked in Victoria. They were part of a huge flood of such migrants who were poured into the new-born colony as the colonial administration scrabbled to cope with the gold rush. The scheme was an unprecedented achievement in government-organised migration. Yet most historians have tended to dismiss these assisted migrants as the unskilled poorest-of-the-poor, and not of the same calibre as the working-class and middle-class unassisted migrants also arriving at the colony in great numbers. Made in Lancashire is a collective biography that explores in detail who the Lancashire assisted migrants were, their origins, why they migrated, where they went on arrival in Victoria, and what they made of their lives. Far from being the dross of England, these migrants were intelligent, highly motivated risktakers, many of whom went on to experience success as gold diggers, selectors, tradespeople, and entrepreneurs.

The death of a bird haunts the relationship between two siblings. A lonely narrator waits for a bus that never comes. A boy makes soup with his grandmother and wonders about the memories she has buried. For the sixteenth edition of Verge, we asked contributors to reflect on the theme of Home, a word that took on a new meaning after a year of solitude and separation. We chose this theme because we hoped to read about homes of all kinds: unhomely homes, abandoned homes, unlikely homes, forgotten homes, found homes. And we were awed by the beauty, depth, and variety in the pieces we received. Our writers explored homes of past, present, and future; they probed the bleakness of domesticity and mourned the loss of what was once held close. They wrote about familial ties and found communities, about the painfulness of childhood and the bonds of ancestry. Writing, indeed, to make a home in.

Autobiography or fiction? This question has shadowed the work of enigmatic Australian author Eve Langley since her death in 1974. Was her writing the truth, or false, or somewhere in between? What did it mean when she described her father as 'evil' and 'perverted' in her first published novel The Pea Pickers (1942) and a kindly figure in later, unpublished work? Did she really believe herself to be Oscar Wilde? Was she gender fluid? Eve and her sister (and co-conspirator) June held onto family secrets as if their very lives depended on it. Eve Langley has been in the news since the 1920s and reviewed on both sides of the globe. She was an author, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter and a long-term psychiatric inmate. But June, who traversed the Australian countryside dressed as a boy, a willing lifelong companion to her beloved sister, is a lonely anonymous figure. Drawing on contemporary evidence, Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers gives the key players in the author's life a voice, and the result is a fascinating but ultimately poignant tale of love and loss.

The Ypres salient 'was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions' wrote one returned serviceman after the First World War. Few who fought in the infamous third battle of Ypres - now known as Passchendaele - in 1917 would have disagreed. All five of the Australian Imperial Force's (AIF) infantry divisions were engaged in this bloody campaign. Despite early successes, their attacks floundered in front of the devastated Belgian Passchendaele's when autumn rains drenched the battlefield, turning it into an immense quagmire. By the time the AIF withdrew, it had suffered over 38,000 casualties, including 10,000 dead, far outweighing Australian losses in any other Great War campaign. Given the extent of their sacrifices, the Australians' exploits in Belgium ought to be well known in a nation that has fervently commemorated its involvement in the First World War. Yet, Passchendaele occupies an ambiguous place in Australian collective memory. Tracing the commemorative work of official and non-official agents-including that of C.E.W. Bean; the Australian War Memorial; returned soldiers; battlefield pilgrims; and, more recently, the Department of Veterans' Affairs, working in collaboration with Belgian locals-The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory explores why these battles became, and still remain, peripheral to the dominant First World War narrative in Australia: the Anzac legend.

Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented period of prosperity in recent decades, yet despite this there has been a widely reported loss of faith in politics and institutions. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia faces its most significant economic and social challenges in decades. How is politics placed to deal with these challenges and what is the capacity of our key institutions to do so? What are the lessons and warnings from history? In Challenging Politics, longtime politician Scott Ryan argues that the way we determine issues, the way we practice politics, and what we expect from politicians and government, is in flux. To some, the virtue of compromise has become the sin of sellout. The louder voices of fringe and single-issue movements attract attention, money and commitment, and apply litmus tests to those who seek to govern. This makes it more difficult for our institutions, and therefore our politics, to function effectively. The long-talked-about collapse of the centre isn't solely about extreme ideas. It is also about how our expectations of politics and our institutions have changed.--

Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics. In the 1980s, the toxic politics of the response to HIV/AIDS turned a serious but manageable viral threat into a global pandemic that took the lives of 32 million people and brought illness and suffering to millions more. In 2020, COVID-19 emerged into a world where many governments had failed to heed the lessons of the past, and so they were unprepared and unable to stop its global spread. But some countries had learned the harsh lessons of HIV/AIDS, and had contained SARS1, Ebola, Zika and MERS. When coronavirus hit, they knew what to do to save their people from avoidable infections and deaths. In Unmasked: the Politics of Pandemics, Bill Bowtell draws on his four decades of experience in the global and local politics of public health to examine why some countries got it right with coronavirus while others collapsed into misery and chaos. He looks closely at the critical weeks when poor planning brought Australia to the brink of disaster, until the Australian people forced their governments to put public health before politics. Unmasked reveals how and why our politicians failed us during the greatest public health crisis of this century to date.

The scandal involving Dyson Heydon, former justice of the High Court, confirmed that the scourge of sexual harassment in Australian workplaces was also to be found in the chambers of one of the seven most senior judges in the country. An unquestioning reliance on the calibre of the fine legal minds appointed to the High Court had blinded us to the reality that sexual harassment is as common in the legal profession as it is in corporate Australia and in all other industries. In particular, in the legal profession, a hierarchical structure and a culture of silence had served to perpetuate feelings of embarrassment, fear and shame on the part of victims. In Power & Consent, Rachel Doyle, a practising Senior Counsel for over a decade, argues that we need to understand the power relationships at the heart of the modern workplace. Sexual harassment is rarely a 'one off'. Perpetrators continue their harassment because they are not called to account for their actions. Silence and complicity allow recidivists to go unpunished and normalise the phenomenon of 'getting away with it'. Perpetrators must be taught what consent means. This book demands a new response to complaints of sexual harassment; one which recognises the power of strength in numbers, the probative value of multiple complaints, and the restorative power of grievances shared. It also calls for the imposition of new obligations: it asks bystanders to become participants and to take collective responsibility for supporting victims and stopping perpetrators.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the digital disruption of business by the information and communications sectors, is well underway in Australia and around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the pace of change. We are witnessing a proliferation of new platforms and new markets, with AI replacing human expertise - we are seeing the transformation of the firm, how we work and the nature of society. These seismic changes are all impacting the global distribution of economic growth and income. And alarmingly, among the OECD economies, as a share of GDP, Australia's ICT sector is around half the average, and falling further over time - it is second-last, only above Mexico. Given the scope and speed of change, Australia is now confronted by a stark choice between becoming a tech innovator, and so a producer of economic profits and high-paying jobs, or stagnating. We are at a crossroads, and our policy choices today will determine whether we remain one of the wealthiest and happiest nations in the world, or see our global position continue to slide. In The Digital Revolution: A Survival Guide, Professor Simon Wilkie argues that, to preserve our status as one of the most desirable economies to live in, we need a policy revolution that addresses not just universal basic income, but tax policy, lifelong education, social inclusion and the nature of work. In short, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to usher in a period of sustained prosperity and increasing equality. But to achieve this demands no less than a rethinking of the social contract.In the National Interest is a new series in the Monash University Publishing list that is focused on the challenges Australia confronts. The series informs, influences and inspires public discourse. Showcasing experts both from within Monash and beyond, these short, thought-provoking and accessible books will address the major issues of our times, from public policy to governance and government.

The erosion of public trust in government has been a characteristic of liberal democracies in recent years. How much have the twists and turns in climate change policy over the past decade contributed to this in Australia? As a senior public servant during six prime ministerships, Martin Parkinson had a front-row seat from which to watch the inability of successive governments to tackle climate change. From an emissions trading scheme through to a National Energy Guarantee, this is a story of science and expertise ignored, short-termism, wasted opportunities, and international disappointment. Climate change demands both a local and a global response, just as do pandemics, mass migration, and ocean pollution. The increasingly urgent question is whether governments are up to the challenge or are prepared to bear the consequences of inaction or indifference. The history of climate change policy in Australia is a sorry story which should leave Australians demanding more courage and commitment from their political leaders.

The level of public frustration and disengagement with political leaders has never been higher. At the same time, the problems we need them to deal with, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis in aged care, and accelerating climate change, are immediate and urgent. Based on his experience working closely with a large number of ministers and their private offices, both at the federal and state level, and his time in the United States, Don Russell reflects on politicians, the political process, and the role of government, and explains why our political leaders are as they are. Drawing on his experience, including his involvement in the golden age of public policy of the Hawke/Keating years and his observations on Australia's early success responding to the pandemic, he suggests that there is a pathway that can lead to dramatically better outcomes for the country and more satisfying and longer careers for our politicians. People want their elected officials to be informed, to be capable and creative, to be able to devise solutions that work, and then to be able to explain those solutions and bring the community with them. They want their elected officials to lead.

In A Secret Australia, eighteen independent and prominent Australians discuss what Australia has learned about itself from the WikiLeaks revelations. This is an Australia that officials do not want us to see. However Australians may perceive our place in the world, whether as dependable ally or good international citizen, WikiLeaks has shown us a startlingly different story. This is an Australia that officials do not want us to see, where the Australian Defence Force's 'information operations' are deployed to maintain public support for our foreign war contributions, where media-wide super injunctions are issued by the government to keep politicians' and major corporations' corruption scandals secret, where the US Embassy prepares profiles of Australian politicians to fine-tune its lobbying and ensure support for the 'right' policies. The revelations flowing from the releases of millions of secret and confidential official documents by WikiLeaks have helped Australians to better understand why the world is not at peace, why corruption continues to flourish, and why democracy is faltering. This greatest ever leaking of hidden government documents in world history yields knowledge that is essential if Australia, and the rest of the world, is to grapple with the consequences of covert, unaccountable and unfettered power. Contributors include author Scott Ludlam, former defence secretary Paul Barratt, lawyers Julian Burnside and Jennifer Robinson, academics Richard Tanter, Benedetta Brevini, John Keane, Suelette Dreyfus, Gerard Goggin and Clinton Fernandes, psychologist Lissa Johnson, as well as writers and journalists Andrew Fowler, Quentin Dempster, Antony Loewenstein, Guy Rundle, George Gittoes, Helen Razer and Julian Assange.