In Clivosaurus, Guy Rundle observes Palmer close up, examining his rise to prominence, his beliefs, his deals and his politics – not to mention his poetry. Rundle shows that neither the government nor the media have been able to take Palmer's measure. Who is Clive Palmer, and what does his ascent say about Australia's creaking political system? In Clivosaurus, Guy Rundle observes Palmer close up, examining his rise to prominence, his beliefs, his deals and his politics - not to mention his poetry. Rundle shows that neither the government nor the media have been able to take Palmer's measure. Convinced they face a self-interested clown, they have failed to recognise both his tactical flexibility and the consistency of his centre-right politics. This is a story about the Gold Coast, money in politics, Canberra's detached political caste and the meaning of Palmer's motley crew. Above all, it is a brilliantly entertaining portrait of 'the man at the centre of a perfect storm for Australian democracy, a captain steering his vessel artfully in the whirlpool.' 'In the first half of the year we saw Tony Abbott treated with deference to his values and beliefs, as his chaotic and lying government slid from one side of the ring to the other, while Clive Palmer, ploughing a steady course on a range of key issues, was treated as the inconstant one. No wonder no one could tell what he was going to do next - they weren't even bothering to look at where he had come from.' Guy Rundle, Clivosaurus This issue also contains correspondence discussing Quarterly Essay 55, A Rightful Place, from Megan Davis, Rachel Perkins, Celeste Liddle, John Hirst, Henry Reynolds, Peter Sutton, Paul Kelly, Robert Manne, and Fred Chaney.

In this moving and controversial Quarterly Essay, doctor and writer Karen Hitchcock investigates the treatment of the elderly and dying through some unforgettable cases. With honesty and deep experience, she looks at end-of-life decisions, frailty and dementia, over-treatment and escalating costs. Ours is a society in which ageism, often disguised, threatens to turn the elderly into a “burden” – difficult, hopeless, expensive and homogenous. While we rightly seek to curb treatment when it is futile, harmful or against a patient’s wishes, this can sometimes lead to limits on care that suit the system rather than the person. Doctors may declare a situation hopeless when it may not be so. We must plan for a future when more of us will be old, Hitchcock argues, with the aim of making that time better, not shorter. And we must change our institutions and society to meet the needs of an ageing population. Dear Life is a landmark essay by one of Australia’s most powerful writers. “The elderly, the frail are our society. They are our parents and grandparents, our carers and neighbours, and they are every one of us in the not-too-distant future . . . They are not a growing cost to be managed or a burden to be shifted or a horror to be hidden away, but people whose needs require us to change.” —Karen Hitchcock, Dear Life

Reporting from the backrooms and corridors of Parliament House in Canberra to the streets of post-industrial Burnie in Tasmania, the struggling rural communities of Gippsland and the Queensland heartland, Royce Kurmelovs captures with perceptive, real-time analysis the rise of Australian populism. The people and places he profiles tell the story of those independent political figures who have tried to take power from the outside and those who feel abandoned by both the left and right of politics. Overshadowing it all is the controversial figure of Pauline Hanson, a woman who came back from oblivion to become a powerbroker just as the country breathlessly watched the election of Donald Trump and wondered whether the same could happen here. ROGUE NATION is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what is happening to politics in this country, and what the future might hold.

Populist forces are becoming increasingly relevant across the world, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, so far no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the populist phenomenon. This handbook provides state of the art research and scholarship on populism, and lays out, not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Oxford Handbook of Populism is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches on populism and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world and includes chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the Post-Soviet States, the United States, and Western Europe. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various relevant issues both from a scholarly and political point of view. Amongst other issues, chapters analyze the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements and technocracy. Finally, the fourth part includes some of the most recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and socialism. The handbook features contributions from leading experts in the field, and is indispensible, positioning the study of populism in political science.

Everyone has heard the clichés about Queensland politics: Queensland is ‘different’. It’s the ‘Deep North’. Its state elections exemplify Pineapple Party Time. But what if those clichés are in fact looking more like the state of affairs in the rest of Australia? Does the Sunshine State represent the new normal in Australian politics? Once, Queensland was seen as the land that time forgot, with a narrow economy based on agriculture, mining and transport – and conservative values. Then, from the 1980s, a transformation took place as the state modernised, entrenching democratic reforms and civil liberties. Yet now, in the era of Campbell Newman, the Palmer United Party and national politics that oozes alarmist populism, it feels like Queensland’s history of eccentricity and unrest has colonised the whole country. So how does Queensland both point the way forward and shine a light on the way we live now? Political commentator and Queenslander Mark Bahnisch looks closely and boldly at the Queensland experience, from the Joh Era to the present. His must-read book reaches some surprising conclusions.

Known for his wild wit and irreverent commentary, Guy Rundle is one of Australia’s most virtuosic minds. Practice distils his best writing on politics, culture, class and more, and includes new and previously unpublished material. In it, Rundle roves the campaign trails of Obama, Palin and Trump; rides the Amtrak around a desolate America; bails up Bob Katter and Pauline Hanson; and excavates the deeper meanings of True Detective and Joy Division. Insightful and hilarious, Practice reveals Rundle as among Australia’s sharpest and most entertaining minds, with a genuinely awe-inducing range and an utterly inimitable voice. There is only one Guy Rundle.

Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters – many from Europe, Australia and Africa – flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong? In Blood Year, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years’ experience to answer that question. This is a vivid, urgent account of the War on Terror by someone who helped shape its strategy, as well as witnessing its evolution on the ground. Kilcullen looks to strategy and history to make sense of the crisis. What are the roots and causes of the global jihad movement? What is ISIS? What threats does it pose to Australia? What does its rise say about the effectiveness of the War on Terror since 9/11, and what does a coherent strategy look like after a disastrous year? “As things stand in mid-2015, Western countries . . . face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region. It isn’t just ISIS – al-Qaeda has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one, but two global terrorist organisations, each with its own regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home and a massive flow of foreign fighters.” —David Kilcullen, Blood Year Winner of the 2015 Walkley Award for best long feature writing.

Over the past 50 years, Indigenous Australian theatre practice has emerged as a dynamic site for the discursive reflection of culture and tradition as well as colonial legacies, leveraging the power of storytelling to create and advocate contemporary fluid conceptions of Indigeneity. Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage offers a window into the history and diversity of this vigorous practice. It introduces the reader to cornerstones of Indigenous Australian cultural frameworks and on this backdrop discusses a wealth of plays in light of their responses to contemporary Australian identity politics. The in-depth readings of two landmark theatre productions, Scott Rankin’s Namatjira (2010) and Wesley Enoch & Anita Heiss’ I Am Eora (2012), trace the artists’ engagement with questions of community consolidation and national reconciliation, carefully considering the implications of their propositions for identity work arising from the translation of traditional ontologies into contemporary orientations. The analyses of the dramatic texts are incrementally enriched by a dense reflection of the production and reception contexts of the plays, providing an expanded framework for the critical consideration of contemporary postcolonial theatre practice that allows for a well-founded appreciation of the strengths yet also pointing to the limitations of current representative approaches on the Australian mainstage. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of Postcolonial, Literary, Performance and Theatre Studies.

'The elderly, the frail are our society. They are our parents and grandparents, our carers and neighbours, and they are every one of us in the not-too-distant future. . . They are not a growing cost to be managed or a burden to be shifted or a horror to be hidden away, but people whose needs require us to change' In Dear Life, using vivid and moving case studies, Karen Hitchcock show what care for the elderly and dying is really like - both the good and the bad. With honesty and deep experience, she looks at end-of-life decisions and over-treatment, frailty and dementia. Throughout she argues against the creeping tendency to see the elderly as a 'burden' - difficult, hopeless, expensive and homogenous. We must plan for a future when more of us will be old, Hitchcock argues, with the aim of making that time better, not shorter. An we must change our institution and society to meet the needs of an ageing population. Dear Life is a landmark book by one of Australia's most powerful writers.