The study of Australian politics in the 21st century: a comment on Melleuish

The academic reality is that there are few political scientists working on the study of Australian politics who are interested in considering its longue durée, and this is reflected in the AJPS. Most political scientists tend to focus on contemporary Australian politics, and the two popular approaches in recent years have tended either to be numerical in approach or to focus on discourse, or a mixture of both. (Melleuish 2015: 731) This is the central argument of Gregory Melleuish’s review of the study of Australian politics in the last 50 years of the Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS). The consequence, as he contends, is that despite their diversity, the articles in the journal do not contribute to a narrative that sheds light on the larger, long-standing issues of Australian politics (Melleuish 2015: 719–20). We take issue with Melleuish’s review, and in this response, argue that it is precisely through this diversity that contemporary Australian politics scholarship has been able to identify and address current and continuing issues of social and political relevance.