The Australian newspaper continues to speak breathlessly of a Chinese Griff nach der Weltmacht. In the latest instalment, ‘China’s irresistible power surge’, Rowan Callick writes: China has broken out. After countless “dragon rising” conferences and speeches … the past few weeks have seen something new: the most important shift so far in the 21st century. […]

It’s often assumed that elected politicians with anti-immigrant policies must be ‘pandering’ to crude popular sensibilities, rather than having their own agenda. This is a tenacious ideological myth (if these are anything to go by): consider the standard historiography on the so-called White Australia policy. The notion that a politically marginal labour movement could dictate […]