Tom Uren gave a lifetime of service to his country: first in war, then as a campaigner for peace, a government minister and, in his later years, a mentor to many.
Australian Information Service 1983/National Archives of Australia
Tom Uren was a “Big Man” not only in stature but in his public life. Uren, who has died at the age of 93, was born into a working-class household. Typical of the 1920s and ‘30s, he had a limited formal…
50 years since his death, there has been no serious examination of Churchill and Ireland.
PA Archive
The accomplishments of Winston Churchill have been widely publicised and reported over the 50 years since his death. Viewed as one of the 20th century’s great politicians and tacticians, he was also a…
Any discussion of ‘mateship’ in 2015 will inevitably exist in the shadow of the centenary of the landings at Gallipoli.
Australian War Memorial
In late 2007, a couple of months after our last HSC exam, one of my best friends punched me. In hindsight, I probably deserved it. We were 18, liberated from school and newcomers to alcohol. To make a…
The protagonists are different in this political reincarnation of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, and so is the lay of the land in Australian politics.
AAP/Dave Hunt
Pauline Hanson has reunited with One Nation to contest the seat of Lockyer in the upcoming Queensland election. The reunion is an acknowledgement that neither Hanson nor her former party has fared so well…
In an otherwise fraught policy landscape, ‘cheapness’ has been one of the cold hard facts of Indigenous affairs.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
Prime Minister Tony Abbott made a bold move in September when he ran the country for four days from a tent at Gulkula in far northeast Arnhem Land in remote Australia. While there, he observed that although…
Christopher Pyne argues that the government is on the side of history in reforming higher education, but it is a bad history that he evokes.
AAP/Lukas Coch
After the defeat of the Abbott government’s higher education bills in the Senate, Education Minister Christopher Pyne invoked the legacy of past “reforms” that had been violently contested at the time…
Politicians would deny that wealthy people buying time with them and donating to parties influences decision making.
EPA/Steffen Schmidt
Below is the text of Michelle Grattan’s Accountability Round Table lecture, November 18, 2014. Most of us who’ve been around politics for a while in one capacity or another can remember the time when misleading…
Politics was very much on display during last week’s memorial service for former prime minister Gough Whitlam.
AAP/Brendon Thorne
Last week, I was one of a sea of Australians who rose to remember Gough Whitlam. Fitting its subject, the Whitlam memorial was sweeping. It was as much a grand story of Australia’s evolution since the…
Burning crosses in Lewes.
Gareth Fuller/PA Archive
Remember, remember! The fifth of November Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason Why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Versions of this rhyme have been chanted in the UK for centuries…
A campaign pro before his time: Benjamin Disraeli.
Wikimedia Commons
We have become used to politicians talking about their emotions and their domestic lives. Indeed, it sometimes seems you can’t get anywhere in politics until you’ve been photographed with your arm wrapped…
Gough Whitlam took principled revisionism to the very top of Labor politics.
AAP/Sergio Dionisio
There was nothing inevitable about Gough Whitlam’s rise to the top. He had to fight every inch of the way. The fight was not only against born-to-rule Liberals who thought he had betrayed his class but…
In office, the late Gough Whitlam sought to fulfil, rather than to end, the promise of capitalism.
AAP/Alan Porritt
The popular response to Gough Whitlam’s death tells us more about the politics of the present than the past. Whitlam has been cast as a messiah; as Labor’s saviour; and as the slayer of what Paul Keating…
Brutal, but not medieval: Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
EPA
In Pulp Fiction, when Marcellus Wallace tells his captor and tormentor Zed that “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass”, we are spared further details, which is just as well since it involves a pair of pliers…
With his strong views on industrial relations, Family First senator Bob Day is what we might call a ‘conservative libertarian’.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Few members of the 20th-century political right were more important than Milton Friedman. As an academic, author, television presenter and adviser to Ronald Reagan – who once described his show Free to…
Robert Menzies may be a Liberal hero for John Howard and his successors in the current government, but his budgets fit their definition of ‘disaster’.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Robert Menzies left Australia in far worse financial shape than he found it, at least according to current treasurer Joe Hockey’s favourite debt and deficit benchmark. Having inherited budget surpluses…
In his response to MH17, prime minister Tony Abbott acted according to some personal and cultural expectations of leadership.
AAP/Alan Porritt
It was the bloodshot eyes that conveyed to one journalist the strain and weariness weighing upon prime minister Tony Abbott as he dealt with the MH17 tragedy. Australians learned of the office naps between…
The government has manoeuvred itself into a position where its bluster has made it vulnerable to Clive Palmer’s bluster in the Senate.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Last week, television news presented grabs of former prime minister John Howard arriving in Canberra. It is unknown if Howard was there to share his wisdom with Coalition MPs on how to deal with minor…
If Clive Palmer wants one thing and his new bloc of senators another, then the Palmer United Party may find itself less united than its name suggests.
AAP/Paul Miller
A soldier, an engineer and a rugby league player walk into federal parliament. It sounds like the opening line of a bawdy joke, or the premise of a reality TV show. But on July 1, three senators from the…
In joining the South Australian government, Martin Hamilton-Smith has caused outrage in a political system in which party loyalty outweighs all other considerations .
AAP/Ben Macmahon
The defection of former Liberal leader Martin Hamilton-Smith from his party to join the South Australian Labor government as a cabinet minister has caused outrage among his former colleagues. He has broken…
The Abbott government’s use of royal commissions for political retribution has revived an older tradition around the politics of scandal.
AAP/Dan Peled
It would be a fair observation that the Abbott government hopes that the result of the two royal commissions it has established since taking office will be damaging to the Labor Party. The royal commissions…