The stipulation that Qantas must remain majority Australian-owned is, above all, a legacy of 1990s Labor politics. There is little logic in keeping it today. When the ALP government of that time walked…
As Liberal MP Ewen Jones walked out of the Coalition parties meeting, Tony Abbott gave him a pat on the back and some praise. “Well said,” the PM told the Queensland backbencher. Jones had just delivered…
It’s passing strange to hear Tony Abbott advancing the gung ho “dry” argument that Qantas must not be treated as a special case. But after he crossed that line in the sand by rejecting aid for SPC Ardmona…
Hardly a week goes by, it seems, when there is not some fresh announcement of job shedding. Qantas’s loss of 5000 is the latest blow. But amid the gloom on Thursday, Tony Abbott optimistically reaffirmed…
Before the election Stephen Conroy inflicted severe damage on his own side with his ill-fated media reforms. Now his badly judged attack on Angus Campbell, the military man in charge of Operation Sovereign…
This week the government’s new “freedom commissioner”, Tim Wilson, fresh from the Institute of Public Affairs, started at the Human Rights Commission, with the central task of promoting free speech and…
There have been so many declarations of good intentions followed by minimal progress that it is hard to dare hope real advancement might be made in Aboriginal affairs in the next few years. Yet, we have…
Overreach seems to be endemic in this government. One would think that, after Tony Abbott laid it on far too thick about workers’ conditions at SPC Ardmona and received a tongue lashing from one of his…
In his Australia Day message this weekend Tony Abbott will repeat his commitment to amend the constitution to recognise Aboriginal people as the “first Australians”. He’ll say this should be a “unifying…
In a cultural milieu dominated by long-form television dramas such as Breaking Bad and Madmen, how has the apparently simple activity of audio storytelling gained such clout? In the US, documentary radio…
David Gonski and members of his panel on school funding, who included Kathryn Greiner and Carmen Lawrence, have every reason to feel appalled at the way their work has been treated and trashed by both…
The most extraordinary intervention in a disastrous week for Australian-Indonesian relations came out of the blue. Who could have anticipated the provocative tweeting by Liberal party pollster Mark Textor…
With the 44th Parliament opening on Tuesday, the next phase of the Abbott government begins. Already we’re seeing its early modus operandi, including its sometimes losing battle to control and often hide…
Tony Abbott must be thinking: thank goodness for the “honeymoon”. It is helping lessen the public impact of some quite serious early problems his government is having. Abbott is assisted not just by the…
Sometimes you wonder about our priorities. Compare the vast attention on politicians’ misuse of entitlements with the limited discussion, as most Australian troops prepare to depart, about the rights and…
With this week’s announcement of the government’s Audit Commission members and terms of reference, Tony Abbott is starting to get his Rudd-like list of inquiries and reviews on the go. The beginning is…
Welcome to the fifth of The Conversation’s Election 2013 podcasts. Each week The Conversation will be sitting down with Australia’s top political minds to discuss all things election as we gear up for…
Welcome to the fourth of The Conversation’s Election 2013 podcasts. Each week The Conversation will be sitting down with Australia’s top political minds to discuss all things election as we gear up for…
Welcome to the third of The Conversation’s Election 2013 podcasts. Each week The Conversation will be sitting down with Australia’s top political minds to discuss all things election as we gear up for…
Welcome to the second of The Conversation’s Election 2013 podcasts. Each week The Conversation will be sitting down with Australia’s top political minds to discuss all things election as we gear up for…
Professor in U.S. Politics and U.S. Foreign Relations at the United States Studies Centre and in the Discipline of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney