Asylum seekers who arrive in Australian waters by boat will no longer have the chance to be settled in Australia under new policies announced by prime minister Kevin Rudd. Instead, asylum seekers arriving…
Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has just paid an official visit to our nearest neighbour and former colony, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Although Rudd explained his agenda as driven by the two countries…
Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s proposal to prevent the ALP caucus from deposing a sitting prime minister has raised the hoary issue of the Westminster system. The dominant view among pundits is that under…
As Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd lands in Port Moresby to meet with his Papua New Guinean counterpart Peter O'Neill, several conundrums are set to tax his mind and diplomatic skills. Front and centre…
Five years ago, prime minister Kevin Rudd took to the nation’s driving seat with the historic Stolen Generation apology. With the theme of this year’s NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance…
Kevin Rudd once called climate change “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time”. Despite the fiery rhetoric, support for climate change action declined during his tenure. So, how…
Public servants often complain that when their ministers go on holiday, they usually return with a rag bag of new policy ideas. Since regaining the ALP leadership, Kevin Rudd has a three year backlog of…
Kevin Rudd advocated a return to a strong live cattle export trade between Australia and Indonesia at a business breakfast in Jakarta on Friday. Maybe he thought the Australian public wouldn’t notice…
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is the cause of delays at the very airport at which he now wants a second runway to proceed… “Kevin Rudd ran a damaging campaign against a second runway in the late ‘90s and since…
Prime minister Kevin Rudd is seeking to improve his chances of re-election by reforming the troubled New South Wales branch of the Labor Party. NSW Labor has been embarrassed in recent years by a series…
Accounts in the media over the past week explain, or rather rationalise, the downfall of our first female Prime Minister. One-time feminist warrior Eva Cox found that Julia Gillard failed to communicate…
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has named his new cabinet, which features a few familiar names and several others that will be unknown to many Australians. Here are some expert reactions to the new ministry…
NOTE: This piece has been updated on July 2 to reflect the scheduled sittings of federal parliament. One of the most important decisions now for new prime minister Kevin Rudd is selecting the date for…
Australia’s 43rd federal parliament has proven that politics is anything but boring. Capping off a day when the two independent kingmakers, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, announced that they would not…
An integral power of the media is that of portrayal: the act of determining how people, events, ideas and organisations are described to the public, and therefore how they are perceived by the public…
Newly reinstated prime minister Kevin Rudd has publicly committed to Labor’s school reform agenda and extended the deadline for states and territories to sign up to the National Plan for School Improvement…
The decision by the Labor caucus to minimise the electoral damage in September and return Kevin Rudd to the party leadership was short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive. More importantly, it operated…
In the middle of the 2012 winter, an influential supporter of Julia Gillard laid out for me the intricacies of the Labor caucus’ power structures, the labour movement’s web of personal antagonisms and…
The morning Julia Gillard was deposed as Australia’s prime minister many of the British newspapers carried a picture of her knitting a present for the future heir to the British (and presumably) Australian…
One of the key platforms of the first Rudd government was to reform the health and hospital system. The key message from then-prime minister Kevin Rudd was that the health, and particularly hospitals…