Paul Keating

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

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 Bush, a Clinton or a Carter, no othe

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 politics think at the moment: We miss Keating. Jones signed off by telling Keating he wished they had more time, because there was “as usual, much more to talk about”. The wrap-up

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

The Plight of the Windsors

Falling Stars

By Peter Conrad

I, too, once saw her passing by, for a few seconds in 1954, on a scrubby hill in Hobart during her first Commonwealth tour. She passed by in an open car as we all flapped our patriotic pennants; in return she signalled her lukewarm enthusiasm with the slow-mot

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, thoug

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 w

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 inartic

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

The History Wars

Comment

By Robert Manne

Paul Keating and John Howard were early players in what Australians have come to call the History Wars, whose main field of battle is the bitter and still unresolved cultural struggle over the nature of the Indigenous dispossession and the place it should assu

Jacqueline Kent's "The Making of Julia Gillard"

The Other Biography

By Christine Wallace

If attention from biographers augurs well for a politician’s career, then Julia Gillard looks good for the Lodge when Kevin Rudd’s day is done. Rudd was the subject of two biographies in the run-up to becoming prime minister in 2007. Now Gillard is on the

Australia and the Indian Ocean

Looking West

By John Birmingham

In the Australian imagination, for the most part, the future arrives every day from the east, where the sun’s first rays wash over the lighthouse at Byron Bay, before flooding across the thin green band of settlement running from the jungled tip of Queensland down to

Racism, Australian-Style

Comment

By Waleed Aly

For all Kevin Rudd’s fantasies of international leadership, Australia rarely impinges on the consciousness of the wider world. We are neither sufficiently powerful nor sufficiently strife-torn to command global attention. Our prime minister can slip in and out of a foreign country – even a major trading partner such as Japan – without arousing more tha

Noel Pearson’s "Up from the Mission"

Here I Stand

By Peter Sutton

Most Australians probably know Noel Pearson in just one or two of his aspects: as the regional leader, lawyer and activist from Cape York Peninsula, or as the national media commentator on Indigenous policy and politics. But his complexities, his gifts and possibly his flaws are Shakespearian in range. Most of the gifts and complexities can be found in Up from the Mission: Selected Writings (Black

Paul Keating & Jack Lang

By Shane Maloney

More than 30 years after his dismissal from office, ‘The Big Fella' was little more than a historical footnote, a near-forgotten figure. But to the 18-year-old Paul Keating, he was a living legend, a man still worth knowing.A self-taught self-improver of the

Hideout

By Mark Aarons

Australians can for the most part be proud of our international reputation for promoting human rights and opposing and punishing those who violate them. Australia is not perfect, but it nevertheless ranks among the world's best nations.Except when it comes to

Eddie Perfect’s 'Shane Warne: The Musical'

The Comeback Kid

By Gideon Haigh

Consider these three vignettes from the storied life of Shane Warne, involving something that happened, then something that didn't, then something that is. On 10 June 2000, London's Daily Mirror publishes front-page allegations that Warne harassed a nurse, whom he met

Panic & Censor

By David Marr

I was putting on a bit of dog for the fresh envoy of a Great European Nation. This was deep in the Howard era, and we were drinking coffee in one of the sitting rooms the Sydney Morning Herald used to have for receiving notables. The new ambassador, a man of pugnacious energy but approaching his last post, wanted some tips about Australia. "What you have to understand," I said solemnly, "is that w