Many female politicians have had to endure sexist abuse, from Cheryl Kernot to Julia Gillard to Sarah Hanson-Young. And it is not a matter that should simply be brushed aside.
The stoush between Senators Sarah-Hanson Young and David Leyonhjelm harks back to age-old - not to mention nonsense and deeply sexist - dichotomies about women’s sexuality and moral character.
Malcolm Turnbull didn’t actually trade his first-born this week but it felt like it might come to that. In a whatever-it-takes frame of mind, the government conceded a great deal to get its legislation…
The Turnbull-Abbott hostilities erupted in a very public manner this week over the terms of a ban on the importation of the Adler seven-shot lever-action shotgun.
Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott are sharply at odds over Abbott’s denial of knowledge about a 2015 deal to insert a sunset clause on the import ban of a shotgun.
Malcolm Turnbull is like the man who threw down a match, started a fire, and is now struggling to breathe because of the smoke. He has inadvertently become the centre of a debate on guns which is at least…
The hyperbole about the Adler shotgun simply does not match with the facts. This is symptomatic of the generally poor quality of debate around firearm policy in Australia.
The government has a new buzzword. In the partyroom on Tuesday Malcolm Turnbull and Barnaby Joyce urged the troops to make the Coalition’s policies “tactile”. In less-fancy terminology, what they mean…
The debate around amending Section 18C is a furphy: the law is there to guard against the most-damaging vilification, and very few cases end up in court.
David Leyonhjelm’s complaint over being called an ‘angry white male’ could showcase the difficulty in launching a successful action under Section 18C and undermine an argument in support of repeal.
The returned Turnbull government can now add arguably one of the most diverse and potentially volatile senates ever to be elected in Australia to its list of political problems.
The Senate reforms and a double-dissolution election means that it is difficult to predict who will be sitting in the upper house after July 2. But you can count on Nick Xenophon being there.
Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm told parliament that of the $1.5 billion spent annually on drug law enforcement, 70% is attributable to cannabis. Are those numbers correct?
Director of Indigenous Leadership and Engagement and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and IT and Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney