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Stuart Kells

Stuart Kells

Stuart Kells is Enterprise Fellow at the Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne, and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize.

Stuart Kells reviews ‘Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with big oil’ by Royce Kurmelovs

November 2024, no. 470 26 September 2024
Journalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several business-focused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020). In Slick, Kurmelovs focuses on how, in the pursuit of personal enrichment, the leaders of Australia’s oil and gas busin ... (read more)

Stuart Kells reviews ‘Rogue Corporations: Inside Australia’s biggest business scandals’ by Quentin Beresford

April 2024, no. 463 25 March 2024
Quentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope o ... (read more)

Stuart Kells reviews ‘Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon’ by Peter Harbison with Derek Sadubin

January-February 2024, no. 461 18 December 2023
Nearly everyone in Australia has a story about bad airline service, and many of those stories involve Qantas, whose ‘mishandled bag rate’ recently doubled and flight cancellations tripled. The formerly smooth and efficient Sydney-Melbourne run is now a dispiriting ordeal. Widespread anger at Qantas provides the context and backdrop for Peter Harbison’s revelatory book (with Derek Sadubin) ... (read more)

Stuart Kells reviews 'Seven Crashes: The economic crises that shaped globalisation' by Harold James

November 2023, no. 459 26 October 2023
This fascinating and frustrating volume is really three books in one: a compilation of revelatory portraits of seven modern economic crises; a beautiful essay on language, literature, and finance; and an effort to draw lessons from the seven calamities. Of the three books, two are brilliant, one less so. Heroes and anti-heroes loom large in each of the economic crises. Harold James’s descriptio ... (read more)