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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrator of Christopher Koch's 1958 novel The Boys in the Island claims for Tasmania "a different soul", distinct from that of the Australian mainland to the north, in the same breath in which he claims for the island "a different weather". Observations of the distinctiveness of island geography and weather - and of the quality of the light - are recurrent in narratives set not only in Tasmania, but also on those islands to which Tasmania itself acts as a 'mainland'. This paper surveys a range of texts, including Koch's The Boys in the Island, Joanna Murray-Smith's Truce, and my own The Alphabet of Light and Dark, in which a Tasmanian island functions both as a setting for the protagonist's idealized childhood and as a metaphor for the protagonist's "true self". It explores the representation of islands in these texts, examining how a specific tradition of writing about Tasmania intersects with a broader tradition of writing about islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]