Quarterly Essay imprint: 77 books

In Bad Company Gideon Haigh scrutinises the way we have turned CEOs into tin gods. Is moral outrage the appropriate response to the collapses of Enron or HIH or are we all implicated in a crazy system? Haigh argues that the attempt to create great entrepreneurs of the new caste of CEOs by giving them...

In Dragon’s Tail, Andrew Charlton explores the supercharged rise of China and considers Australia’s future as the Chinese dragon stirs and shifts. China’s rise has been perhaps the most significant economic event in two centuries, occurring 100 times more quickly and on a scale 1000 times larger...

Rather than relaxed and comfortable, Australians are disenchanted with politics and politicians. In Quarterly Essay 46 Laura Tingle shows that the reason for this goes to something deep in Australian culture: our great expectations of government. Since the deregulation era of the 1980s, Tingle finds,...

Tony Abbott is the most successful Opposition leader of the last forty years, but he has never been popular. Now Australians want to know: what kind of man is he, and how would he perform as prime minister?In this dramatic portrait, David Marr shows that as a young Catholic warrior at university, Abbott...

Power Trip shows the making of Kevin Rudd, prime minister. In Eumundi, where Rudd was born, David Marr investigates the formative tragedy of his life: the death of his father and what came after. He tracks the transformation of a dreamy kid into an implacably determined youth, already set on the prime...

In the fourth Quarterly Essay of 2004, Raimond Gaita confronts essential questions about politics as it is practised today. What do politicians mean when they talk about "trust"? Why is truthfulness important? Are we as politically and morally divided as the Americans? Does the war on terror authorise...

When Mal Brough and John Howard announced the Northern Territory intervention in mid-2007, they proclaimed a child abuse emergency. In this riveting piece of reportage and analysis, Paul Toohey unpicks the rhetoric of emergency and tracks progress. One year on, have children been saved? Will Labor continue...

In Paradise Betrayed John Martinkus details what is being done to West Papua by its Indonesian overlords. He illustrates how those who seek independence are killed and tortured for their cause. There is now no one like the Papuan leader Theys Eluay, murdered in 2001 by the Indonesian military, and...

Whatever happened to good government? What are the signs of bad government? And can Malcolm Turnbull apply the lessons of the past in a very different world? In this crisp, profound and witty essay, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. She ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised...

In Bipolar Nation, Peter Hartcher discusses the fantasies and realities at the heart of our politics. When our political leaders look at us, what do they see? What are the hopes, fears and dreams of the Australian electorate, and how might they be turned to election winning advantage? What, most fundamentally,...

In Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance, David Malouf looks at Australia's bond with Britain and wonders whether it wasn't the Mother Country which did most of the giving. This is an essay which presents British civilisation, the civilisation of Shakespeare and the Enlightenment and the...

In Radical Hope, one of Australia’s most original and provocative thinkers turns his attention to the question of education. Noel Pearson begins with two fundamental questions: How to ensure the survival of a people, their culture and way of life? And can education transform the lives of the disadvantaged...

What is the Liberal Party's core appeal to Australian voters? Has John Howard made a dramatic break with the past, or has he ingeniously modernised the strategies of his party's founder, Sir Robert Menzies? For Judith Brett, the governmeant of John Howard has done what successful Liberal governments...

This is an essay about “quarry vision”, the mindset that sees Australia’s greatest asset as its mineral and energy resources – coal especially. How has this distorted our national politics and our response to climate change? What happens now that our coal-fired resources boom has gone bust?...