Peter Mares
Peter Mares is lead moderator with the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and a contributor to Inside Story magazine. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s Housing Crisis (Text Publishing, 2018), Not Quite Australian: How temporary migration is changing the nation (Text Publishing, 2016), and Borderline (UNSW Press 2001), an analysis of Australia’s refugee policies. Peter previously worked for twenty-five years as a broadcaster with the ABC, mostly with Radio National.
This month marks a grim anniversary: four years ago, in August 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard re-introduced a policy of offshore processing for asylum seekers who try to reach Australia by boat. Since then we have inflicted terrible punishments on thousands of vulnerable men, women, and children who made the mistake of seeking safety in the wrong country at the wrong time.
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Does a law change the way people behave and think? Can it accelerate a shift in cultural norms? These are some of the questions that emerge from this reflection on Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (1975).
Tim Soutphommasane is hardly a disinterested commentator, since he owes his current job as Racial Discrimination Commissioner to the very act that he is writing about. So this is a sympat ... (read more)
After an explosion that killed five asylum seekers and injured dozens more on a boat moored at Ashmore Reef in 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described people smugglers as ‘the absolute scum of the earth’ and ‘the vilest form of human life’. Further tragedies at sea during the ‘fifth wave’ of boat arrivals to Australia provoked similar outbursts from politicians across the political s ... (read more)
Usually, significant books are revisited on significant anniversaries. By these lights, Mike Berry’s critical re-evaluation of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society should have appeared in 2008, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication. In this instance, we can be grateful that normal publishing practice has not been followed, for it enables Berry to incorporate the ... (read more)
Australian advocates of a harsh line against asylum seekers arriving by boat often base their arguments on a concern for the protection of human life. Unless we deter boat people, so the reasoning goes, ever greater numbers will set out on the dangerous voyage from Indonesia, and more and more lives will be lost at sea. This may sound like a novel position, but, as Andy Lamey makes clear in Fronti ... (read more)
On the day that I finished reading Into the Woods, I opened the newspaper to a report that Gunns was withdrawing from native forest logging to base its future business entirely on plantation-grown timber. Given that Gunns controls almost eighty-five per cent of the wood products traded in Tasmania, this has raised hopes of an end to the decades-old forest war in the island-state.
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