Harmony by Restraining Order
Synopsis: Governments can’t grow cohesion, so they try to legislate it into being.
Theme archive
Musings on Policy and Public Power
Policy, public administration, state capacity, regulation, governance systems, and institutional action.
Letterhead and Load
What Matters When Companies Hit Turbulence
A Deeper Defeat
Synopsis: The Democratic sweep in the US mid-term elections is being widely read as a rebuke to one president.
A Mandate for Life
Synopsis: Three people must be persuaded before any democracy changes how it explains and governs itself: the expert adviser who seeks only to please the client, the politician whose seat depends on present...
Advice Without a Passport
Why ethical principles cross borders while campaign tactics stay at home
Leaving Normal
Helping leaders feel what they already know
Where the Births Were Written
Synopsis: The fire that gutted Limoges town hall on 17 October 2026 destroyed the office where the city recorded its births and marriages.
Dilemma of the Scriptwriters
Synopsis: Iran’s president spent some of his scarcest hours in New York with the analysts and journalists who draft Washington’s options, rather than with the officials who choose between them.
Coffee Port
Before it was ever a front line, Mokha was just an aroma.
What The Borrowing Buys
Reflections on Debt in Australia and Elsewhere
The Little Blue Book
And the fiction we nostalgically call the international order
Misreading Xi
An Alternative Argument for Australia's Public Inquiry into AUKUS to Consider
The Crown and the Machine
A man in his late seventies stands before the British Parliament wearing several centuries of borrowed authority — crown, ermine, a phalanx of guards whose uniforms date from wars nobody living can possibly remember —...
Certainty’s Standing Ovation
A thousand people rose to their feet in Sydney on 22 August 2026.
Outside The Prayer Hall
When Feelings Arrive Before Words
A Correction Before It Arrives
A curator in a regional art gallery is completing the wall text for a group show.
The Instrument and The Cage
What Language Does When No One is Watching
The Order That Never Arrived
When Institutions Obey a Rule Nobody Wrote
What Remains When the School Has Gone
A Manifesto for Education Beyond Industrial Economism
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