John Howard

Australia’s shipwrecked refugee policy

Tragedy of Errors

By Robert Manne

Since 1976 fewer than 50,000 asylum seekers have reached Australia on boats. More than half have arrived since the election of the Rudd government; more than a third – over 17,000 – in the past 12 months. Until the Tampa incident in late August 2001, policy regarding asylum seeker boat arrivals was bipartisan. Since then the question of the boat asylum seekers has been fiercely co

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 indeed not only them – Malcolm Turnbull is a Keating admirer. In the history of Australia’s belated recognition of the injustice done

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 Shipowners’ Association and Victorian Employers’ Union, boasted that he was the “best abused man of the day”. He went on: The men who organised ‘labour against c

Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard in Retirement

Love thy Leader

By George Megalogenis

A curious feature of our political debate is the way it compels former prime ministers to lose their dignity in the endless feedback loop of the legacy war. The Americans, despite their more openly hostile political culture, treat their ex-leaders with sufficient deference to absolve them of the need for after-the-fact combat. When a memoir is written by a B

Australia–India Relations

The Elephant in the Room

By Michael Wesley

Great expectations attend the Australia–India relationship. The Labor Party’s agreement to sell uranium to India has removed a major impediment to closer relations. Planning is underway for mutual prime ministerial visits. Free trade agreement negotiations

Scott Morrison

So Who the Bloody Hell Are You?

By Nick Bryant

In a country that has always exhibited a fickle streak towards foreigners heading for its shores, Scott Morrison is especially well credentialled to speak on the subject of his shadow portfolio, immigration. The Liberal politician who has spent much of the pas

CanDo? Campbell Newman’s Bid for Queensland

By Nick Bryant

Crestfallen conservatives would have drawn little consolation from the potentially morale-boosting fact that Brisbane City Council is the biggest local government fiefdom in the country, nor from the 617,000 registered voters who make up Australia’s largest single ele

Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour

Island Rising

By Fiona McGregor

Is there any place more typical of Sydney’s protean nature than Cockatoo Island? A decade ago, it was a wasteland. One hundred and fifty years of industry had layered it with a toxic tiramisu of asbestos, cadmium, lead and more. The island had also been a co

Troy Bramston’s 'Looking for the Light on the Hill'

New Labor Dreaming

By Maxine McKew

Coming from New South Wales, a state that has made an artform of decapitating leaders, Bramston doesn’t always follow the logic of his own material and is coy about a rudimentary question. Who owns and wields power in the Labor Party? Who makes the decisions? As Senat

Window Dressing: The Mirage of Political Reform

By Lindsay Tanner

Such sentiments are understandable but misguided. The rules that govern how our political system works matter, but the development of policies and legislation tends to be driven by more fundamental forces. When governmental process delivers decisions we don’

Lessons in Leadership and Paul Keating

The Book of Paul

By George Megalogenis

Comparisons between leaders can be unfair to the incumbent because the one with the job has yet to receive the clemency of political nostalgia. But there was something in the interviewer’s voice that betrayed what many of my colleagues who cover federal poli

Comment: Palin Politics and the Tea Party

By Don Watson

The fact of the automobile for instance; and Big Oil, which fuelled it; and the strip malls, which made the car indispensable to commerce, including commerce in food; and agribusiness, which made the greater part of United States farming a state-subsidised vertically in

What’s Right? The Future of the Liberal Party

By Peter van Onselen

A new way of clustering Liberal MPs has emerged since the Coalition was defeated at the 2007 election. An old-fashioned state-based divide is opening up between the Victorian and New South Wales divisions – and, perhaps more importantly in the short term, an age divide is fracturing the party as the remnants of the John Howard era cling to the hope of vict

Comment: The ALP Afterlife

By Julian Morrow

Within a week of resigning as Finance Minister, as well as accepting an academic posting Lindsay Tanner became a special adviser to “pre-eminent financial advisory and asset management firm” Lazard. At Lazard, he may well work with the firm’s “Chairman, Corporate Advisory International”, Paul Keating.Former Queensland premier Wayne Goss is now the Australian chairman of Deloitte, a firm

Life after the Intervention

Hard Times

By Paul Toohey

My interest in Driver came from a story that appeared some weeks before in the Tennant & District Times, the local paper, on 19 November. Driver’s only son, aged 29, had been killed while walking on the Stuart Highway outside Wycliffe Well, a fuel and gr

Cronulla Five Years On

Comment

By Malcolm Knox

One such line was drawn in the infamous early summer of 2005, when Sydney seemed to fracture into racial violence. From Cronulla to Lakemba, two self-declared tribes took it upon themselves to settle their differences by violent means. An alarmed city, and cou

The Defence Minister

Comment

By Hugh White

Why is defence so toxic to its ministers? It should be an easy job to look good in – hobnobbing with the Australian Defence Force (ADF), managing weighty matters of national security and spending a lot of money. Of course the portfolio has an unparalleled capacity to

Blanche’s Boy

By Anna Krien

“Until recently I’ve been pretty half-hearted about Welcome to Country,” Jack Charles confesses as he faces a room of social workers at a drug and alcohol rehab centre in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. A short Koori man with fuzzy white hair floating around his head like a dandelion, Jack’s initial sense of ‘country’ was Box Hill Boys’ Home, his “first and foremost siblings” approximatel