Australia’s political landscape has recently featured
significant changes – not the least of these a change
in Federal Government. After an extended period of
conservative Coalition tenure a ‘landslide victory’ by
the Rudd Labor Government has signalled what many
hope will be a fundamental change in policy direction.
References to the previous Howard government’s
ideological program – as expressed in several of the
extended obituaries of the era that already pervade
the bookstores – suggest that it was the dramatic
changes to civil society that most worried observers
of the Australian political scene.