Choosing Cairns or Townsville as a northern Queensland capital would set off a political storm, as would new regional governments around Australia.
Dan Peled/AAP
Federal politicians and the public like the idea of abolishing the states. But consider the likely result: a more powerful Canberra, with regional governments amounting to glorified shire councils.
Bob Hawke recently renewed calls for Australia to axe state governments.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Leaving aside party-politics, there are good reasons why Australia should consider changing its Constitution to abolish state governments.
Unionists protesting the reduced role of the Industrial Relations Commission after the introduction of the work choices legislation in 2006.
Julian Smith/AAP
Even though enterprise bargaining agreements proved controversial when introduced, their use is actually in decline today.
Paul Keating took the prime ministership with a ‘comprehensive plan to get the country cracking’, but the task was daunting.
National Archives of Australia
Labor’s project of economic transformation hit some harder realities as Paul Keating assumed the top job. And a new push on remaking Australia stirred a brooding reaction of its own.
Australian wind energy has been under a cloud for much of its decades-long history.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Skirmishes over funding for renewable energy research are just the latest battle in a saga that stretches back to the early 1980s – years before the public became widely aware of the climate threat.
As per tradition Malcolm Turnbull has hosted the annual Prime Minister’s XI cricket match.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Since his ascendancy, the currently trim and muscular-looking Malcolm Turnbull has – for an Australian prime minister – had unusually little to say about sport.
Some Coalition’s policies have been seen as a fundamental assault on Medicare principles of bulk billing and universality.
Dan Peled/AAP
Scare campaigns only work if there is some anxiety to build on. Labor’s Medicare campaign plugged into a long history of Coalition ambivalence – or open hostility – towards Medicare.
It’s quiet out there, too quiet.
Outback image from wwww.shutterstock.com
There’s been a deafening silence in recent Australian elections over the environment. But it hasn’t always been the case.
Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull will be working hard to prevent the kind of errors and complacency that have tripped up leaders before them.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’s report was meant to be a blueprint for reducing the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous Australians and deaths in custody.
A ten-week – or longer – campaign is not necessarily a problem for Malcolm Turnbull.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The conventional wisdom is that Bob Hawke’s 1984 election was too long and almost disastrous, and therefore not to be repeated. But the times are very different now.
The Australian government seems to think fossil fuels need help, when businesses are deciding otherwise.
Coal image from www.shutterstock.com
Do fossil fuels need saving from efforts to combat climate change? The Australian government seems to think so, but that sort of thinking is out of date.
The journey to detention on Manus Island (pictured) and Nauru has its origins in 1990 cabinet discussions of asylum seeker policy.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
The logic of the policy changes initiated by the Hawke government in mid-1990 has underpinned asylum-seeker policy for much of the quarter-century since.
Gareth Evans, foreign minister in the Hawke government, brought an ambitious vision for Australia’s international diplomacy to cabinet.
AAP
There is little of Gareth Evans’ sweeping analysis in the cabinet papers of 1990-91 of a rapidly changing world order or of his vision of good international citizenship.
Prime Minister Bob Hawke opening the General Assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Perth, November 1990.
National Archives of Australia
The National Archives of Australia today released selected federal cabinet records for 1990 and 1991. They reveal intense battles over Australia’s domestic climate targets and, above all, a palpable determination that Australia not damage its coal revenue.
Hawke said his government passed more legislation in 1990 and 1991 than any other since federation.
National Archives of Australia
While the press at the time focused on what Keating called “the Punch and Judy show”, cabinet papers reveal that the fourth Hawke government was working at an astonishing pace at reforms still felt today.
Mutual admiration between big businessmen like Alan Bond (left) and the Labor Party was a double-edged sword for Bob Hawke in the 1980s.
AAP/NAA
In the 1980s Australians grappled with the challenges of living in an era that brought together boom and crisis, nationalism and globalisation, confidence and anxiety, and conservatism and exuberance.
Recent federal governments have not had the courage to draft, debate, test and pass legislation asserting and implementing Australian multiculturalism.
AAP/Richard Ashen
In leadership contests in particular, the media’s role is often markedly different from the competition between parties.
Ros Kelly was the first in a long line of federal ministers to address themselves to the question of Australia’s emissions target.
AAP Image/Lee Besford
When Australia’s government first pledged to set an emission-reduction target, Jon Bon Jovi was riding high in the charts. The progress made in the 25 years since has hardly been a blaze of glory.