Stephen Mills

Handbook of Political Party Funding edited by Jonathan Mendilow and Eric Phélippeau

At its best, political science research is empirical, systematic, comparative, and provides cogent and durable explanations – not just descriptions – of political behaviour wherever it is observed. What a pity then that the Handbook of Political Party Funding, for all its strengths in these areas ...

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Run for Your Life by Bob Carr

by Stephen Mills •

September 2018, no. 404

Stephen Mills reviews 'Run for Your Life' by Bob Carr

The latest publication by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, a prolific author since leaving federal politics in 2013, is a political memoir that defies the norms of this often-predictable genre. Largely abandoning chronological narrative, Carr offers a disjointed sequence of nearly ...

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Making Modern Australia: The Whitlam government’s 21st century agenda edited by Jenny Hocking

by Stephen Mills •

November 2017, no. 396

Stephen Mills reviews 'Making Modern Australia: The Whitlam government’s 21st century agenda' edited by Jenny Hocking

In his powerful eulogy for Gough Whitlam at the Sydney Town Hall in November 2014, Noel Pearson described the former prime minister – this ‘old man’ – as one of those rare people who, though he never suffered discrimination, understood the importance of protection from its malice. Pearson speculated on the apparent paradox ...

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Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction by Paul Strangio, Paul 't Hart, and James Walter

by Stephen Mills •

May 2016, no. 381

Stephen Mills reviews 'Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction' by Paul Strangio, Paul 't Hart, and James Walter

In the early years after Federation, Australia's first prime minister, Edmund Barton, was accommodated on the top floor of the Victorian Parliament in Spring Street, in a converted garret. At the end of a parliamentary day, the convivial Barton would invite ministerial colleagues up to the flat where they would talk long into the night. Then, as one senator later re ...

The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political leadership in the modern age by Archie Brown

by Stephen Mills •

November 2014, no. 366

Stephen Mills reviews 'The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political leadership in the modern age' by Archie Brown

A remarkable feature of the concept of political leadership is its apparently infinite elasticity: it stretches over presidents and prime ministers, dictators and popes, revolutionaries and reformers. Take the concept beyond politics, and its reach effortlessly expands to include business executives, platoon commanders, primary school principals, the captain of the cricket team, and many more. But is it useful, or even accurate, to describe all these figures as ‘leaders’ given they, and the entities they lead, have almost nothing in common? Are they really comparable as leaders?

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