Australia Politics

Someone wants Russian millionaire Dmitry Lebedev dead. After years flying under the radar in Sydney, he’s just had a narrow escape when a sex worker is poisoned in his hotel room. In desperation he contacts his former CIA case officer, Ronnie Johnson, offering to expose a traitor inside the Australian government in return for protection.

When the main course is heavy going or unappetising, the 'bits on the side' make life really delicious. Our small, meaningful selections are the ones that make life glorious, and the side dish is the perfect metaphor for what many of us need right now. A Bit on the Side is Virginia's ode to joy, filled with wisdom, stories, memories and recipes, all told with her renowned insight and wicked sense of humour.

You care what's happening in the world - but you can't help feeling you missed the part where the key stuff got explained. What's a budget deficit? How does voting actually work? What's the deal with the UN? And what does net zero mean again? Thankfully, No Silly Questions is here to lay out the facts and principles behind the day's headlines. Zara Seidler and Sam Koslowski, creators of The Daily Aus - Australia's leading social-first news service - are like your super well-informed mates who you can rely on to quickly bring you up to speed.

The true story of Deng Adut - Sudanese child soldier, refugee, man of hope. Movingly narrated by Blessing Mokgohloa. Deng Adut's family were farmers in South Sudan when a brutal civil war altered his life forever. At six years old, his mother was told she had to give him up to fight. At the age most Australian children are starting school, Deng was conscripted into the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

On 9 October 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stood up and proceeded to make all present in Parliament House that day pay attention—and left many of them squirming in their seats. The incisive 'misogyny speech', as her words came to be known, challenged not only Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, on his words and actions but, over time, all of us. How had we come to condone the public and private behaviours of some very public men? In this book, Julia Gillard explores the history and culture of misogyny.

In the years that John Howard served in the national parliament he came to understand the special character of Australia; to appreciate its strengths and weaknesses; and most importantly to respect the sense of balance in the formulation of public policy that has long defined us as a nation and made Australia an attractive destination for people from across the world.

This book is about freedom and the right to have an opinion. A concept that has been fought over for centuries. Whilst we think of Australia as being a free society, You Can't Say That! challenges this notion, arguing that the freedoms all Australians once enjoyed have been systematically eroded over last few decades, and how, as a nation, we must fight to get them back.

Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three-bedroom blonde brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's life is just like all the other Aussie kids' on her street. Except for this one glaring, inescapably obvious thing. From one of Australia's most exciting writers and the author of the multiaward-winning Foreign Soil comes The Hate Race: a powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.

In this witty, engrossing and sometimes poignant memoir, a sequel to his best-selling The Justice Game, Australia’s inimitable Geoffrey Robertson charts his progress from pimply state schoolboy to top Old Bailey barrister and thence onwards and upwards to a leading role in the struggle for human rights throughout the world.

Imagine a typical day in the office where threats are constant. You are always protecting something; you are always fighting someone; everything is a secret; any delay in responding is dangerous, or even deadly. A political chief of staff is a curious, high-octane role - little-known to those outside the corridors of power, yet enormously influential within.

At an exclusive private school in Switzerland, mystery surrounds the identity of the beautiful girl who arrives each morning and leaves each afternoon in a heavily protected motorcade fit for a head of state. She is said to be the daughter of a wealthy international businessman. She is not. And when she is brutally kidnapped across the border in the Haute-Savoie region of France, Gabriel Allon, the legendary chief of Israeli intelligence, is thrust into a deadly secret war with an old enemy that will determine the future of the Middle East—and perhaps the world....

The Power of Suffering is psychologist David Roland’s personal investigation into the nature of human suffering. When our world is turned upside down, what does it do to us, how do we survive it, and, most importantly, how can we grow as a result? David takes the lived experience of eleven incredible people and follows them along each step of their journey from crisis through to acceptance and triumph. Within each story, David draws on his own experience of life-altering trauma and clinical research to offer insights we all can gain from.

The gripping finale to Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers brings to a close Matthew Condon's best-selling true-crime trilogy. In 1983, the soon-to-be-knighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of The Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel.

As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, the 100th woman in the senate and the only engineer in the senate, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our country and how things are changing for the better or worse. This is the story of a Brown, migrant Muslim woman breaking into a white man's world and striving to change it without being changed. It is an honest, no-holds-barred account of what happens when reality meets perception and when you shatter long-held stereotypes and confront a system steeped in privileged hierarchies, racism and sexism.

In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven-year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family’s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australia’s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member.

James Cook gilt als bedeutendster Entdecker nach Kolumbus. Freilich: Ohne Tupaia, Maheine und Mai wären seine Reisen unmöglich gewesen. Sie führten Cook in die Welt der Südsee ein, bewahrten seine Schiffe vor gefährlichen Korallenriffen und ersparten es ihm, in Neuseeland von den Maori als Eindringling massakriert zu werden.

In today's ruthless world of organised crime, the best criminals aren't foolish enough to steal money out of banks. They wear tailored suits, carry briefcases, and discreetly slip money into banks. Bigwigs, oligarchs and crime syndicates running drugs, trafficking guns and people, arming terrorists and subverting government controls are desperate to put a legitimate face on their wealth. Washing dirty money, moving it around the globe, making it look legitimate is where the action is for both criminals and the authorities chasing them.

Hugh Riminton was a small-town New Zealand teenager with a possible drinking problem and a job cleaning rat cages when a chance meeting with a radio news director changed his life. The news man took a chance on him, and at 17 Riminton became a cadet reporter. Over nearly 40 years he has been shot at, blown up, threatened with deportation and thrown in jail. He has reported from nearly 50 countries, witnessed massacres in Africa, wars and conflicts on four continents, and every kind of natural disaster.

Ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest, the Currowan fire was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia's Black Summer. It burnt for 74 days, consuming nearly 5,000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. In the aftermath, there were questions. Why were resources so few that many faced the flames alone? Why was there back-burning on a day of extreme fire danger? Why weren’t they better prepared?

In the September Quarterly Essay, Hugh White considers Australia’s place between Beijing and Washington. As the power balance shifts, and China’s influence grows, what might this mean for the nation?Throughout our history, we have counted first on British then on American primacy in Asia. The rise of China as an economic powerhouse has challenged US dominance in the region and raised questions for Australia that go well beyond diplomacy and defence....