POLITICS

The Battle for Bennelong: Round Two

By Nick Bryant

An affectionate type, she embraces a couple of familiar-looking locals and sits down for a quick natter with a group of elderly ladies before taking the microphone to a ripple of appreciative applause from the mainly grey-haired audience. As you would expect from a former television presenter – a recruit from that kingdom of prime ministerial mind known as “7.30 Report-land” – her del

A Green Balance?

By Guy Pearse

Having moved so far to the Right, both major parties are perceived by many to have lost touch with their political roots. On one side, the Liberal Party is unrecognisable to those who once led it. Doyens of the party’s right-wing in their day, Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson are now constant critics: of its foreign policy, its climate change response, its treatment of asylum seekers and its

Life of Brian

By Paul Barry

Burke struck me, during those two off-the-record conversations, as a rather pathetic figure, a man in denial. He seemed to be living in his own little bubble, no longer able to listen to anybody except his supporters. This stunning court victory reveals, though, just why he has stuck so close to friends and family.It’s no secret that Burke and his supporters are adamant he’s never done anything wrong: not when, as premier, he rorted

From the Chrysalis

By Don Watson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2010. It was a bad night for neo-cons, neo-liberals and neo-Hobbesians, the last being those wiseacres in and around the now-crumbled Bush administration who had been inclined to justify the “muscular unilateralism” of recent American policy by reference to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The neo-Hobbesians maintained that, being a g

UK Elections

Comment

By John Keane

Last month’s hung parliament in the British election confirms a basic rule of modern politics: whenever markets fail, representative democracy falters. Not just in the UK, but throughout the European Union, the near collapse of the credit and banking system

Water Policy

Comment

By Mark Aarons

When Malcolm Turnbull announced his retirement from politics in April, he trumpeted his achievement of “a truly revolutionary reform of the way water is managed in Australia”. He rightly referred to the decades of “state run mismanagement of the waters o

Rudd’s ETS Backflip

Comment

By Tim Flannery

Kevin Rudd’s decision to defer his emissions trading bill until 2012 represents an abrupt and dramatic policy reversal, the significance of which, both nationally and globally, will only grow with time. It’s a funk in the true sense of the word: a shirking of respon

Nuclear Dawn

By Malcolm Knox

The one constant is the belief of nuclear proponents – as durable as a radioactive isotope – in their technology. Even though the political momentum for introducing nuclear energy in Australia has been lost, advocates are supremely confident that the ‘nu

On Your Bike Tony Abbott

Comment

By Robert Manne

It would be ridiculous to claim that Abbott has not qualified, or even abandoned, aspects of the apocalyptic and exhilarating Santamaria world view he breathed in as a young man. But it is entirely accurate to insist that he has been fundamentally influenced from then u

Kissinger & Burchett

By Shane Maloney

Wilfred Burchett was a tad wary when he presented his ID to the sentry at the White House on a foggy morning in October 1971. His passport was Cuban and his UN press pass restricted him to New York. But the marine waved him through and, sure enough, President

The Game of Politics

Amateur League

By Mungo MacCallum

In nineteenth-century Britain, politics was seen as a bit of a diversion from the real business of life: a sort of gap year (or years) taken by those who felt it was their duty to serve the public or at least give the public the benefit of their superior wisdo

Strictly Speaking

By Alan Saunders

“I’m not going to bore you with a lot of oratory, because I’m not an orator,” Sir Les Patterson once remarked. “I’m an Australian politician.” He was unfair to his breed and to his country as well. Australia’s reputation for tongue-tied inarticulacy or,

New Labour & The ALP

Comment

By Tim Soutphommasane

For much of the last three years, the conventional wisdom has been that Britain’s New Labour was experiencing its slow death under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Few would have imagined anything other than David Cameron’s Tories winning this year’s general election in May. Yet at the time of writing, Westminster commentators are revisiting the draft obit

Health Reform

Comment

By Bill Bowtell

In a bold reform package unveiled in March, Kevin Rudd proposes that the Commonwealth government should assume the dominant responsibility for funding Australia’s public hospital system. His reforms would strip from the states and territories their century-old stewardship of public hospitals. These proposals are the first instalment in what should be a complete renovation of the health system, b

National Curriculum

Comment

By Waleed Aly

That’s the thing about meddling with a curriculum: it is an inescapably political, often ideological, exercise. I do not, for instance, need to tell you where South Dakota’s legislature sits on the issue of climate change. Theirs is not a scientific judgem

Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs

Progressively Liberal

By Tim Soutphommasane

Malcolm Fraser tells a story about his time as army minister in the 1960s administering conscription during the Vietnam War. In a hotel bar in his electorate of Wannon, in Victoria's Western District, Fraser was confronted by a constituent whose son’s number

The Melbourne Model

Dangerous Precedent

By Margaret Simons

Davis mentions the book when I ask him why, at a time when the higher education sector is more stressed than ever before, he is trying to introduce radical change. “There are always arguments for doing nothing,” he says. True, higher education is badly underfunded b

Comment

By Robert Manne

Over 200 years ago human beings began burning large quantities of the coal, oil and natural gas that had been buried under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. This may eventually come to be seen as the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind. When the industrial revolution began there were 280 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mainly because o