Peter Hartcher

Peter Hartcher is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. He is an award-winning journalist and author. After three years in Washington DC as the correspondent for the Australian Financial Review, he returned to Australia at the end of 2003 and joined the Lowy Institute as a visiting Fellow. While at the Institute he is writing a book on the Wall Street bubble of 1996-2000 and the recession that followed. In March 2004 he took up a new post as political editor and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald. Hartcher has a distinguished record as a journalist. He won the Holy Grail of Australian journalism, the Gold Walkley Award, for his investigative series into how Australia secretly negotiated a security treaty with Indonesia. He won the Citibank award for business reporting for his coverage of the Asian economic crisis. He was a Walkey finalist in 1992 for an investigative account of how Paul Keating challenged Bob Hawke for the Prime Ministership of Australia, and again in 2003 for his analysis of US motives for the invasion of Iraq. He has been called twice to testify as an expert witness to Federal Parliamentary inquiries into Australia's relations in the Asia-Pacific and commissioned to write essays on Asia for the Washington-based foreign policy journal The National Interest. His book, The Ministry, the first detailed study in English of Japan's Ministry of Finance, is a window onto Japan's disastrous bubble economy and an insight into how Japan works. It was published in Japanese in 1997, and then in the US by Harvard Business School Press, in 1998. It was very positively reviewed. Business Week described it as "a dazzling mix of statistics, case studies, juicy anecdotes, and analysis" that was "key to understanding the recent past and future of Japan's political economy." David Hale called it "a fascinating account," and Professor Ross Garnaut wrote that it was "highly recommended for business consultants, scholars, and government leaders."