POLITICS

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 until now by the first political thinker who got to him. On one occasion, Abbott described Santamaria as “the greatest livin

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 Nixon’s national security adviser was waiting in the West Wing to greet him.Burchett reported on wars, making little effort to hide h

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 wisdom. There were, of course, the others: the time servers, the party hacks, the go-getters and the grafters, who, it was widely believed, made up the bulk of those with their snouts i

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, at best, strong silence, still much cherished in the Old Dart, is ill-founded; our politic

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

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-o

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 judgement, despi

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

After Copenhagen

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

Tony Abbott

The Whirling Dervish

By Louis Nowra

The two days I spent in emergency, I whiled away my time trying to block my ears to the cries of angry injured drunks and moaning victims, and listening to conversations from the other curtained-off beds. A nurse came in to tend to a fellow opposite my cubicle

Keith Windschuttle

Comment

By Robert Manne

Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the

New South Wales

Failed State

By John Birmingham

You cannot blame them, because Perry’s restaurant, located in a grand old insurance building, does soar. To stand in the entry foyer is to find yourself unable to resist craning your neck to gaze up into the vast high spaces, artfully lit by two illuminated working sculptures fashioned from thousands of hand-polished Riedel wineglasses. Thomsen describes t

Conference Bound

Copenhagen and Beyond

By Tim Flannery

For all their importance, the international climate negotiations have hardly been pursued with urgency. Until recently, they have been somewhat Wagnerian in character: seemingly interminable and with expectations of resolution eternally denied. In September, however, something happened that set the negotiations on a new path and gave them renewed momentum. The new mood was perhaps best captured by

Sceptical Thinking

Copenhagen and Beyond

By Peter Doherty

The scope of what science can do is constantly being enhanced by technology. While microbiology is benefiting from new, ultra-high-speed gene and protein sequencers, climatology is being informed by next-generation satellites that can measure the depth and are

The National Party

Changing Frontiers

By John Birmingham

The Flinthart of that once-upon-a-time rarely flinched from the confronting, and occasionally violent, practice of direct action when demonstrating his displeasure with the black-hearted devils of the old Bjelke-Petersen regime in Queensland. Thus, he found hi

A Necessary Idea

By Fiona Capp

After driving from one side of the island to the other, we arrive at a gate blocking the road. Lena Pasternak hops out to open it. Several hundred metres away, cows wade through the sea. Just before we reach the tip of this remote peninsula, Lena points in the direction

Pirate Politics

By Charles Firth

By this time next year, Australia’s political system could be controlled by pirates. In June this year, Sweden’s Pirate Party secured 7.1% of the vote in the European elections. Then, in September, the Australian Pirate Party opened nominations for the election of its key office holders, proudly declaring its intention to run in every seat across the country. Seven days later, the party’s me