Carnaby’s black cockatoo lives only in southwestern Australia. Although a much-loved cultural icon, it is now facing a major threat to its persistence: urban growth. Will Western Australia’s favourite bird survive Perth’s expansion?

It is already listed as endangered under state and federal legislation. Historical land clearing...

Move over Nate Silver! The statistician and author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don’t may have called 49 out of 50 states right in the 2012 US Presidential election. But today I note that my predictions for the 2014 mid-term elections were 100 percent...

Perhaps all Western countries with which Australia might choose to compare itself have, since the early 1990s, engaged in intergovernmental decentralisation. They have done so as part of a metropolitan “renaissance” that includes “experiments” with metropolitan government.

In contrast, Australia’s state governments are...