The 2014 Productivity Commission’s draft of its investigation into childcare has recommended a single, means-tested childcare payment should replace the existing array of government subsidies to parents, nannies should be covered by the plan, and the Prime Minister's paid parental leave scheme should be tapped to help fund it. The aim is to make childcare [...]
The Hon John Howard OM AC, was Prime Minister from March 1996 to December 2007. Since retirement from politics, John Howard has proved to be a successful author with his best selling autobiography Lazarus Rising. In 2014, John Howard published a second book – The Menzies Era: The Years that Shaped Australia - on the [...]
Caroline Overington is the Associate editor of the Australian Women’s Weekly and the author of a number of books, of which the most recent is Last Woman Hanged which forensically examines the case of Louisa Collins, the last and only woman ever hanged in New South Wales. Taking a number of years to read all [...]
On Monday 10 November 2014, Her Excellency Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO launched Noel Beddoe’s Linda Burney - A Life at The Sydney Institute. The book’s launch brought together an eclectic audience – filling the Gallipoli Club’s function room and spilling into the ante room. Lynette Riley performed a welcome to country and presented Linda [...]
Television presenter Geraldine Doogue recently turned her attention to an issue central to our times. How are women, represented at the top levels of power in Australia? In her book, The Climb, using candid and personal conversations with fourteen women leading the way in fields as wide-ranging as business, politics, religion, education and the armed [...]
Renowned Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann has been described by Geoff Page in the Sydney Review of Books as "the most protean Australian poet of his generation, a user of masks, but also of those difficult tones which allow direct confession without sentimentality or self-deception." To celebrate the publication of his most recent anthology - Poems [...]
Australian economist Dr John Edwards is a member of the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia and Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. In his Beyond The Boom, John Edwards challenges the prevailing pessimism. Cutting through the confusion, Edwards shows that the mining boom is far from over - and that it hasn't been [...]
Robert Murray has been a freelance journalist and independent historian since 1981. He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books on aspects of Australian history – most recently The Making of Australia - A Concise History (Rosenberg. Publishing) He has been a prolific contributor of articles on history to magazines and [...]
On Tuesday 9 September 2014, The Hon Ian Macfarlane, Minister for Industry, addressed The Sydney Institute to outline the Abbott Government’s Industry policy. In the Minister’s opinion, Australia needs to “be looking to industries that can secure long-term jobs for people, based on clever high-tech ideas, where they can use the latest manufacturing techniques.” In [...]
As the G20 leaders prepared to meet in Brisbane, The Hon Bill Shorten addressed The Sydney Institute on 13 November 2014 Sydney. Taking as his theme his vision for future Australia, Bill Shorten advanced arguments for Australia to take a lead on action to counter climate change and introduce an emissions trading scheme. In his [...]
