Michael Pusey
University of New South Wales
With Assistance of Shaun Wilson, Nick Turnbull and Toby Fattore
Cambridge University Press, 2003
ISBN 0-521-65844-6

Winner of the Australian Sociological Association Stephen Crook Memorial Prize for the best monograph in Australian Sociology: 2001-2003

This book puts middle Australia under the microscope, examining now quality of life is faring in the face of change and uncertainty. Four hundred Australians from around the country shared their experiences of work, family and community for this book, creating a striking picture of Australian society as it heads into a new century. This lived experience is set against hard data so that we can truly understand the impact - good and bad - of economic restructuring on the broad Australian meddle class. Meticulously researched, it mounts a moral and intellectual counter-argument to economic reform. Following on from the groundbreaking success of Economic Rationalism in Canberra, Michael Pusey's new book will be equally important.

'Commentators talk about Middle Australia. In this humane and scholarly book, Michael Pusey talks with Middle Australians instead, to find out what they think is happening to their world. The result is fascinating. One of the most important contributions to Australian self-understanding of recent years.'
Robert Manne

'Ten years ago Michael Pusey's research told us how we were landed with 'market rule' without much chance to vote about it. Now in a fair sample of middle Australia he has found a landslide majority for a fairer, fully employed, less unequal and more sustainable economy than small government has ever given us.'
Hugh Stretton

'We should applaud Michael Pusey for reminding us that our proper study is not the bottom line but the way we live and relate with each other, and that the quest for constant growth ignores the need for harmony and balance in the finite world that we inhabit.'
Elizabeth Evatt

'Middle Australia is stretched, anxious, angry. Michael Pusey is its champion. This is moral sociology at its best.'
Peter Beilharz

'Pusey's provocative and important book is a challenge to contemporary orthodoxies. Society, he warns, will bite back if we choose to build our civilisation solely around the concern of business to operate with as little constraint as possible. He deserves to be read - and heeded.'
Will Hutton " The State We're In" and " The World We're In "

'Middle Australia wants other riches than money. It has a lurking suspicion that economic reform involves highway robbery of human values. Michael Pusey and his team have unveiled a fascinating insight into the hidden Middle Earth of Australian thinking.'
Bob Brown

'If the doctrine that "markets know best" is an empirical thesis, not merely fundamentalist dogma, then a variety of questions at once arise. The great value of this book is that it poses some of the most important of these: in particular, the crucial question of "how people experience the economy." The answers are instructive, in some respects chilling, and should become a central component of public debate on the radical reconstruction of Australian society that has been imposed on the basis of principles that are far from self-justifying.'
Noam Chomsky