Robert Manne

Robert Manne on John Howard’s ‘Lazarus Rising’

Politics is indeed a strange business. We have recently experienced the most dismal election campaign in memory, where the argument between the major parties turned on a series of confected panics about cynically selected non-problems – the reincarnation …

The first boat in Australian history with asylum seekers on board reached our northern coastline in April 1976. Over the next 34 years a further 24,000 boatpeople, as they came to be called, arrived. One of the most intriguing and puzzling questions of …

In the history of Australian politics there has never been a collapse as dramatic, unexpected and unnecessary as the one experienced by Kevin Rudd during the past two months. Those who have been supporters of the prime minister and his government must …

Tony Judt’s 'Ill Fares the Land'

In 2010, Manne hoped Abbott would exit early

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 …

Late last year, to a strangely muffled fanfare from his friends, the third volume of Keith Windschuttle’s self-published magnum opus, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, appeared. Its subject is the stolen generations. Windschuttle must …

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 …