Australian Politics

May 2013

The Tyranny of Affluence. George Megalogenis and Geoffrey Blainey

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Australia may not suffer from the tyranny of distance (the phrase originally coined by Geoffrey Blainey) now so much as the tyranny of affluence. We are one of the very wealthiest...

May 2013

Slippery Pete and the Record for Political Flexibility

By Mungo MacCallum

For a couple of days there it looked as though Peter Slipper had his sights set on an unlikely quadrella. Had his application to join Clive Palmer’s still-putative United Australia party stuck, it would have meant that he had sat in the House of Representatives as a member of three separate parties, and also as an independent. Unfortunately he was denied this feat, reportedly b

May 2013

No New Tax

By Mungo MacCallum

As if this election wasn’t mad enough already, both sides have decided to break the cardinal rule of Australian poll politics: No New Taxes. In fact, not only have both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott declined to make this core promise: each is going into the final months with at least one new tax proudly displayed on the party’s campaign banner. Of course, they’re not actually taxes; rather they’re, well, le

April 2013

Local government is in trouble

By Mungo MacCallum

Local government is in trouble – well, local government is always in trouble, but this time it’s not over charges of corruption or embezzlement; our third tier of government is actually going broke. A report to the New South Wales Government admits this, but instead of blaming the states for duck-shoving their own responsibilities for th

March 2013

The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely. Mungo MacCallum with Kerry O'Brien

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Since Australia’s birth in 1901, twenty-seven politicians have run the national show. Their time at the top has ranged from eight days for Frank Forde to eighteen years for...

March 2013

Paul Keating in Conversation with Robert Manne

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Appearing at the Melbourne Recital Centre in conversation with Robert Manne, Paul Keating speaks about his life in and around politics; the ideas and reforms that animated his...

March 2013

Paul Keating, on the changes to the Australian economy, 1980-2008

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Speaking at the launch of his biography, Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's Interrupted Revolution (David Love, Scribe), Keating demonstrates the undeniable force of his...

March 2013

The Sweet Spot. Peter Hartcher In Conversation

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Australians now officially have the best living conditions in the world. Our country is both fair and free – and the only developed nation to have avoided a recession in the...

March 2013

Too Much Luck: Paul Cleary on the Mining Boom

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Paul Cleary in his recent book Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia's Future shows how the resource boom, which seems a blessing, could well become a curse. In his...

March 2013

Power Without Responsibility. Robert Manne and Eric Beecher

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Renowned essayist and public intellectual Robert Manne discusses his new Quarterly Essay on The Australian with Eric Beecher (Crikey). Entitled Bad News: Murdoch's Australian...

March 2013

Seeking a Leader Like Keating. George Megalogenis In Conversation

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In his Monthly essay, Lessons in Leadership, George Megalogenis writes about the malaise in contemporary Australian politics, and how a leader like former Prime Minister Paul...

September 2012

A Note on the Shifting Polls

By Monthly Wire

The latest Newspoll has Labor and the Coalition at 50–50 for the two-party-preferred vote. By contrast the AC Nielsen poll has the two parties at 47–53. Which poll is right? In 2011, in Quarterly Essay 41, George Megalogenis addressed this question: “T

Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott

By David Marr

I am not asking the Australian people to take me on trust but on the record of a lifetime and an instinct to serve ingrained long before I became opposition leader: as a student president, trainee priest, Rhodes Scholar, surf life-saver and volunteer fire-fighter, as well as a member of parliament and as a minister in a government. —Tony Abbott, to the Fed

July 2012

July 2012 Editor's Note

By John van Tiggelen

When lining up the photo shoot in mid May for the Bill Shorten profile, I put the question whether anything was likely to happen soon, leadership-wise. Don’t worry, the press secretary said. Nothing was going to happen before June. Sure, but the story was running in July. There was a pause at the end of the line. Was anything likely to happen before July? Another pause, then: “No, I wouldn’t

June 2012

June 2012 Editor's Note

By John van Tiggelen

When the federal Treasurer wrote an essay in the Monthly's March issue on the threat to Australia's egalitarian ethos posed by vested interests, the Australian interpreted it as the opening shot in a "class war". It marked an interesting deviation for Murdoch

Turnbull Speaks on Life in Politics

One Morning with Malcolm

By Robert Manne

Paul Keating was the prime minister deemed most responsible by Liberals for imposing the yoke of political correctness on the shoulders of the Australian people. In our conversation, it becomes clear that on questions connected to race and ethnicity – and in

Forgotten People, Elites and Class Warfare

Once Were Warriors

By Nick Dyrenfurth

On 18 January 1886, a remarkable letter to the editor appeared in the pages of the conservative Argus newspaper as a bitter wharfies’ strike brought ‘marvellous Melbourne’ to a near standstill. Its author, Bruce Smith, variously president of the Victorian Shipowne

Gareth Evans & Ali Alatas

By Shane Maloney

One was a career diplomat, the very model of discretion, patience and good manners. The other was a famously volcanic politician, a thrower of tantrums and ashtrays, witheringly intolerant of others’ imperfections. It was 1988 and each had just been appointed his respective country’s foreign minister. For Gareth Evans, the world stage suddenly beckoned. With a friend like Ali Alatas, a newcome