Inside Story

Australia's twenty-second prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, defeated in 1983 by Bob Hawke after almost eight years in office, has remained a significant public figure. But he has written little about the often-turbulent events of his long political career. Now comes an autobiography written not by Malcolm Fraser alone, but in collaboration with the journalist and writer, Margaret Simons. Together they've produced Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, written in the third person and bearing all the hallmarks of rigorous research and journalistic method. How did this process actually work? Peter Clarke asked Margaret Simons to reflect on a challenging co-writing experience. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 14 April 2010.

Barack Obama has gone onto the front foot, but did he leave it too late? Political historian David Farber discusses the post healthcare reform prospects with Peter Clarke. Interview originally appeared on the 'Inside Story' website 28 April 2010.

Peter Clarke talks to Margaret Simons and Tim Dunlop about the federal government's media inquiry and the fallout from the judgement in the Andrew Bolt case.



Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 11 October 2011.

Brian McFarlane talks to Peter Clarke about a lifetime at the movies.



Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 23 December 2010.

In this interview with Terry Lane, first broadcast on ABC Radio National's The National Interest in 2002, Rob Oakeshott discusses why he joined the Nationals, and why he left.



Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 25 August 2010.

After simmering for a year in the Melbourne Age, allegations of international bribery involving Securency, the bank-note company half-owned by the Reserve Bank, have gained national coverage following a Four Corners story late last month. Age investigative journalists Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie talk to Peter Clarke about where the first nugget of information came from, how they researched the story, how they worked with Four Corners to take it further and why it took so long to become a scandal.



Audio original published on the Inside Story website, 18 June 2010.

With the Australian's online paywall up and running, Peter Clarke talks to the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz, Crikey editor Sophie Black and the University of Canberra's Jason Wilson about the Australian's experiment, the success of the New York Times's 'porous paywall', and the broader challenge of persuading readers to pay for online content.



This interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website on 2 November 2011.

Even before election day the signs were that the news media were struggling to interpret national politics in a way that captured the interest of readers and viewers and enhanced the democratic process. Meanwhile, neither of the major parties was making a convincing pitch for a majority of votes. But it was the hung parliament that threw the spotlight most brightly on the shortcomings of the political and media establishment, raising important questions about how politics and policy are practised and reported in this country.



In this podcast Peter Clarke talks to political scientist Brian Costar and Sophie Black, editor of the online news and current affairs site, Crikey, about what happened and where we might be heading from here.



Originally published on the 'Inside Story' website, 16 September 2010.

Conferences on 'the future of journalism' have become a growth industry. In many ways, the news media's own digital evolution has become one of its biggest stories. The collapse of the twentieth century funding model for (quality) journalism is pre-occupying western news operations. Rupert Murdoch is leading another attempt to try to make online news content pay its old media creators as well as its new media recyclers. But the myriad micro-realities of changing journalism practice in a digital age mean journalism academics and practitioners have plenty to describe and argue about.



The School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne's recent conference, Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalisation and National Identity, brought together career academics, journalists-turned-academics and a range of news practitioners and executives from Australia and overseas. Peter Clarke was there to gauge the latest thinking on possible futures for journalism.



This podcast features interviews with Barbie Zelizer, Terry Flew, Ralph Begleiter and Sarmila Bose and is part of the 'Inside Story' series.

There are some shocks in John Keane's (University of Westminster) latest book, The Life and Death of Democracy. First, he punctures the "democracy started in Athens" myth - "assembly democracy,"" he writes, was practised much earlier and further east. But a bigger jolt comes from his thesis that democracy did not emerge as an historical inevitability. It was an invention at a certain time and place, not a natural state of human power-sharing. And its survival as a system of government in the twenty-first century is far from secure. John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin. He took part in a debate, "Does Democracy Have a Future?", at the 2009 Melbourne Writer's Festival, where Peter Clarke spoke with him about democracy's surprising past, challenging present and uncertain future.