(2022) Live Like It Matters: Senator Kimberley Kitching
It is achingly sad that the whip-smart, vivacious, principled, Senator Kimberley Kitching died on Thursday in Melbourne, aged 52, apparently of a sudden heart-attack.
(2021) Labouring People
Chris Bowen, the former Treasurer, now Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, is an avid reader, and curious about the motivation, thinking, and conflicts that rule the hearts and minds of political folk.
(2021) Australian Politics in the Shadow of the Cross
This book of essays continues the work of the P.M. Glynn Institute of the Australian Catholic University (ACU), whose 12 book-length, and other, publications under the Kapunda Press imprint over the past six-years encourage espousal, renewal, and debate about Catholic traditions and ideas.
(2021) Australian Jurists and Christianity
This is a collection of 24 essays on jurists, politicians, and related others, who made a mark on Australian history and whose Christian faith in and/or reaction to Christian ideas made an interesting impact.
(2021) Their Fiery Cross of Union
Here is a radical reassessment of 1901, the formation of Australia viewed as a less than glorious moment in Australian history. Economist, economic historian, and Australian Federation critic William Oliver Coleman argues and writes well, though leaving room for doubt about his critique and conclusions.
(2021) “Doc” Evatt: Labor’s “Lost” Leader
Until now, despite several appealing attempts, the brilliant, complex, exasperating, shrewd, and naïve Herbert Vere Evatt QC, PC, KStJ (1894-1965), Labor politician, judge, and historian, lacked a compelling biography.
(2021) Memoirs of a Cold War Warrior
This is a lucid and interesting story by Keith Harvey: From university activist in the Democrat Club at Monash University in the early 1970s, gradual attraction to the ideals and works of the National Civic Council (NCC), conversion to Catholicism, marriage, children, recruitment to the anti-communist union cause, union work, including the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) in 1977-78 (it did not end well), then the Federated Clerks Union (FCU) to retirement, and attraction to the ideals of the Australian Labor Party in coalition with Christians concerned with social justice.
(2021) Conscience, Religious Tolerance, and Why It Matters to the ALP
Rodney Cavalier’s review (Newsletter 241) of the book The Write Stuff (Connor Court, 2020) comments on my Chapter, ‘Faithful and Labor: What Labor Ignores at Its Peril’ and argues that there is no problem.
(2021) British Labour: To Stay or Go
There were two periods in recent British Labour history where leaving the party was a more than usually troubling question for a lifelong supporter to consider.
(2020) Burke and Australian Labor
This essay suggests that Burkean ideas apply to the Australian labour tradition7 and help illuminate that tradition as well as enabling the explication of competing ideas that sit outside, sometimes in competition and sometimes as complementary.