Peter Mares

Peter Mares reviews 'Lee's Law' by Chris Lydgate and 'The Mahathir Legacy' by Ian Stewart

April 2003, no. 250 • 18 October 2022

Singapore and Malaysia have a lot in common beyond a shared border and a shared colonial heritage. Both countries have been dominated for decades by one strong leader – Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Dr Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia. Both have a weak Opposition and a muzzled media. Both have an internal security act inherited from the British, and which is used to detain people without trial. In both ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'Australia's Immigration Revolution' by Andrew Markus, James Jupp and Peter McDonald

February 2010, no. 318 • 29 September 2022

In September 2009, Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed that Australia’s population of twenty-two million was growing much faster than anticipated. Just three years ago, the Intergenerational Report 2007 projected a population of twenty-eight and a half million in 2047. Treasury now expects the population to exceed thirty-five million people by 2049, an increase of almost sixty per cent. This forecast ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'The Forest Wars' by Judith Ajani

October 2007, no. 295 • 01 October 2007

I am embarrassed by my deck. It is well designed, sturdily built and a congenial place on a balmy evening. The problem is that the deck is made with tropical hardwood, logged from a rainforest in South-East Asia. Not only have I added to Australia’s yawning trade deficit, I have also contributed to the decline of the globe’s equatorial lungs. ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'Reconnected: A community builder’s handbook' by Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

Disaster movies tend to follow a similar arc. Our band of heroes not only has to survive flames engulfing the skyscraper or sea water flooding the cruise liner, but must also triumph over the calculated selfishness of others who are also scrambling for salvation. The implication is that, with few exceptions, Thomas Hobbes was right. Amid the upheaval of the English Civil War, Hobbes declared that ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'Lifeboat Cities' by Brendan Gleeson and 'Transport for Suburbia' by Paul Mees

September 2010, no. 324 • 01 September 2010

These two books share common assumptions about the nature of our cities and our collective future as homo urbanis. If we are to survive the impending disaster of climate change and build an environmentally durable and socially just future, then we must do so within our existing, sprawling suburban landscapes. Gleeson and Mees know and respect one another’s work – each quotes the other approvin ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover' by Liz Allen

May 2020, no. 421 • 28 April 2020

In Australia, debate about population runs in well-worn grooves. The focus is on size – ‘big Australia’ versus ‘not-so-big Australia’ – and the tool used to regulate numbers is immigration. When politicians link population growth to excessive house prices, traffic congestion, unemployment, or crime, they call for immigration cuts, not for birth control. Liz Allen wants us to think abo ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru' by Madeline Gleeson

August 2016, no. 383 • 22 July 2016

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. ... (read more)

Peter Mares reviews 'I'm Not Racist But ... 40 Years of the Racial Discrimination Act' by Tim Soutphommasane

September 2015, no. 374 • 25 August 2015

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)

Peter Mares reviews 'Confessions of a People-Smuggler' by Dawood Amiri and 'The Undesirables: Inside Nauru' by Mark Isaacs

October 2014, no. 365 • 01 October 2014

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)

Peter Mares reviews 'The Affluent Society Revisited' by Mike Berry

April 2014, no. 360 • 27 March 2014

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)