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.

Peter Mares reviews 'Frontier Justice: The global refugee crisis and what to do about it' by Andy Lamey and 'Contesting Citizenship: Irregular migrants and new frontiers of the political' by Anne McNevin

April 2012, no. 340 • 01 April 2012

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)

Peter Mares reviews 'Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests' by Anna Krien

November 2010, no. 326 • 15 November 2011

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. ... (read more)