Votes for established centre-right and centreleft political parties are falling across the developed world. Australia is not immune from this trend: in the 2016 federal election, more people voted for minor parties than at any point since the Second World War. Australia is an interesting case study for the rest of the world on the origins of populist support. Political scientists have struggled to separate the effects of cultural shifts and poor economic outcomes (low wages and rising inequality) in many countries because these shifts have occurred simultaneously. However, in Australia the economy was relatively healthy during the period of rising minor party support. Our analysis suggests that falling trust in government and a backlash against the pace of social change explain much of the collapse in support for the political mainstream.

Writing Baba Yaga into the Tasmanian Bush Works of fiction come into being through mysterious routes of knowing. It' s not at all unusual to hear a writer report that a story "came to them," as if stories were not things invented by writers, but preexisting entities floating in the ether. Elizabeth Gilbert is far from alone in her insistence that "ideas are a disembodied, energetic life form," and that they "spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners" (35). A few years ago, I was visited in this mysterious way by the idea that I should write about a woman who lived in the Tasmanian bush in a small, timber hut, high on a hillside. It seemed that instantly I knew the following things: the woman rescued and nurtured marsupial creatures that were orphaned when their mothers were killed on the roads; there lived beneath the floorboards of her home a Tasmanian devil; the woman was ageing, or perhaps ageless; and she was a literary relative to Baba Yaga, the Slavic witch-crone of European fairy-tale tradition. This last piece of knowledge might have meant that I was being invited to perform a fairy-tale retelling, but because Baba Yaga (unlike most other fairy-tale characters) appears in a number of different tales, it was perhaps less of an invitation to retell a tale than to relocate a character and see what she would do in new surroundings. Writers can say yes or no to the ideas that visit them. I said yes, and, because I am a writer with one foot in academia, I embarked on the quest to capture my Baba Yaga armed with the twin butterfly nets of creative practice and critical discourse. That is, I not only began the work of bringing my Baba Yaga into life on the page by imagining her world, exploring the narrative

In Australia, both the Commonwealth and state governments are running substantial budget deficits, and future challenges are likely to make these problems worse. This paper presents the key challenges facing these budgets. Falling terms of trade and lower nominal economic growth will drag on government revenues. Spending in health and infrastructure has grown faster than GDP. State government revenues are also affected by Commonwealth decisions to reduce grants to them. We also show how the government's short-term and medium-term projections rely on overly-optimistic assumptions about organic revenue growth and spending restraint. As such, a drift back to surplus is unlikely and restoring budget sustainability will require Australian governments to make more politically difficult decisions. While containing spending is important, both the politics of budget repair and the sheer size of the budget gap means that they will not be able to bring their budgets to balance without also boosting revenues.

While Canadian scholar Lisa M Fiander argues that fairy tales are 'everywhere' in Australian fiction, this paper questions that assertion. It considers what it means for a fairy tale to be 'in' a work of contemporary fiction, and posits a classificatory system based on the vocabulary of contemporary music scholarship where a distinction is made between intertextuality that is stylistic and that which is strategic. Stylistic intertextuality is the adoption of features of a style or genre without reference to specific examples, while strategic intertexuality references specific prior works.Two distinct approaches to strategic fairy-tale revision have emerged in Australian writing in recent decades. One approach, exemplified in works by writers including Kate Forsyth, Margo Lanagan and Juliet Marillier, leans towards the retelling of European fairy tales. Examples include Forsyth's The Beast's garden ('Beauty and the Beast'), Lanagan's Tender morsels ('Snow White and Rose Red') and Marillier's short story 'By bone-light' ('Vasilisa the Beautiful'). The other, more fractured, approach is exemplified in works by writers including Carmel Bird and Murray Bail, which do not retell fairy tales but instead echo them and allude to them. This paper proposes that recent Australian works that retell fairy tales are less likely to be set in a recognisably Australian context than are works which take a more fractured approach to fairy tale. It also explores the notion that, presently, transporting European fairy tales, whole, into an Australian setting, seems to be a troubling proposition for writers in a post-colonial settler society that is highly sensitised to, but still largely in denial about, its colonial past.TEXT Special Issue 43, Into the bush: Australasian fairy tales eds Nike Sulway, Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Belinda Calderone, October 2017 2 serendipity, A week without Tuesday and Blueberry pancakes forever have been published in Australia, Germany and the USA.

Her thesis included the novel The alphabet of light and dark, which won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2002 and the Dobbie Literary Award in 2004. Her works include Rosie Little's cautionary tales for girls, Mothers Grimm and Housewife superstar: The very best of Marjorie Bligh. Dr Wood has collaborated with fellow Tasmanian writer Heather Rose, under the pen name 'Angelica Banks', to produce a trilogy of adventure stories featuring a young writer, Tuesday McGillycuddy. Finding serendipity, A week without Tuesday and Blueberry pancakes forever have been published in Australia, Germany and the USA.