Putting aside concerns about feasibility and cost, it’s difficult to square the policy with the basic principles on which the Liberal Party was founded.
Alan Kohler’s Quarterly Essay lays out how the policies of successive governments have not only failed to address housing problems, but actively created them.
Hundreds of Australians wrote to Jackie Kennedy after her husband was killed. The letters paint a revealing portrait of who we were and who we wanted to be.
The referendum has highlighted what many have previously overlooked or denied: that Indigenous Australians (like other Australians) aren’t of one political mind
Menzies created the Liberals from the rubble of its once successful but ultimately dysfunctional forebear, the UAP. It wasn’t the first time the centre-right reinvented itself. It could happen again.
The partnership between the Liberal and National parties has a long and at times chequered history – but it has also had tremendous success in winning and holding government.
Since the advent of the two-party preferred system, there have been two examples of parties governing effectively in minority, and with the support of independents.
Facing protests by students and academics over its Liberal Party links and generous funding by the Morrison government, the centre’s most important test will be whether it respects academic freedom.
Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies insisted universities should have protection from political interference. But Bob Hawke’s education minister John Dawkins dismantled these protections.
Daughters of Robert Menzies and Arthur Calwell say parliament wasn’t always a “fort”
The Conversation, CC BY79,2 MB(download)
Last week, Michelle Grattan moderated a very special discussion with the daughters of Menzies and Calwell at Parliament House. This podcast episode is a recording of that event.
In 1960, Harold Holt, the then-treasurer, urged the government to abolish import restrictions, resulting in a minor recession. This nearly swung the election in the ALP’s favour.
Historians attribute the Coalition’s election victory in 1949 to issues like bank nationalisation and the Communist Party. But the decisive issue was petrol rationing.