By Kate Griffiths, Democracy Deputy Program Director, Grattan Institute
Aruna Sathanapally, Chief Executive, Grattan Institute
Matthew Bowes, Senior Associate, Economic Prosperity and Democracy, Grattan Institute
Around the world, democracy as a system of government is backsliding. After more than 50 years of liberal democracy in ascendancy, democratic progress plateaued around the turn of the century and is now going backwards.
In 2025, there were only 31 liberal democracies out of 179 countries assessed. And the United States – once the poster-child for…
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By Giuseppe Carabetta, Associate Professor of Workplace and Business Law, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney
If you live in these parts of Australia, you’ll get an extra public holiday for it this year. But millions of others aren’t so lucky.
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By Melanie O'Brien, Professor of International Law, The University of Western Australia
Humanitarian personnel put themselves in harm’s way to help others. An international law expert explains how we can keep them safe.
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By Craig Costello, Professor, School of Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology
Online data is generally pretty secure. Assuming everyone is careful with passwords and other protections, you can think of it as being locked in a vault so strong that even all the world’s supercomputers, working together for 10,000 years, could not crack it.
But last month, Google and others released results suggesting a new kind of computer – a quantum computer – might be able to open the vault with significantly less resources than previously thought.
The changes are coming on two fronts. On one, tech giants such as IBM and Google are racing to build ever-larger quantum…
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By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne
While stopped in heavy Melbourne traffic recently, I noticed that what looked like a shadow under a row of spotted gums (Corymbia maculata) along a major road was actually a stain on the concrete kerb.
As a botanist, it caught my attention; biological stains always have an interesting story attached.
Stains like these – under many tree species, on your car after certain leaves have fallen on them, and on your timber deck after rain has washed leaves onto it –…
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By Judy Ingham, Newsletter Producer, The Conversation
Every day, we publish a selection of your emails in our newsletter. We’d love to hear from you, you can email us at yoursay@theconversation.edu.au.
Monday April 13
Electric dreams
“Reading the article about 6 things Australia should do to tackle the energy crisis made me wonder how big the task is to ‘turn over’ the passenger vehicle fleet as the main candidate…
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By Aly Bailey, Assistant Professor in Recreation and Leisure Studies, University of Waterloo
Turning hobbies into income streams may ease financial pressure, but it can also drain the joy that made them meaningful in the first place.
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By J. Andrew Deman, Professor of English, University of Waterloo
In a new media era, comic fans share our comics experience with others online — debating, reflecting, recommending and enjoying.
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By Ruolz Ariste, Adjunct Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University
As Canada celebrates meeting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence, it’s important to remember this spending isn’t counted within the concept of what’s known as social GDP, an alternative metric focused on measuring a nation’s social development, well-being and sustainability rather than just monetary production.
Excessive…
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By Léa Clermont-Dion, Professeure associée en éducation spécialisée en études féministes, Concordia University
Over the past 10 years, masculinism has moved from the fringes to the centre of public debate, driven by social media and its viral dynamics.
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