As the government hints the marriage equality plebiscite may be delayed until 2017, calls intensify for the parliament to legislate on the issue instead. So what is parliament’s role here?
Vincent Lingiari looks on as Prime Minister Gough Whitlam swigs champagne after the symbolic handback of the Gurindji people’s land.
Rob Wesley-Smith
A new book reveals the drama and comedy of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s famous “hand back” of Gurindji land in 1975, following the Wave Hill Walk-Off 50 years ago – and the bittersweet aftermath.
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.
Housing costs are driving poorer families into areas with fewer and fewer opportunities.
Kate Ausburn/flickr
The 2016 articulation of an urban agenda assumes building more highways, railways and trams will produce better, more productive cities that somehow give everyone a job.
The 1975 crisis surrounding the dismissal of the Whitlam government was brought about in part by the nature of Australia’s constitutional arrangements.
NLA
The way in which Bob Wilesmith’s footage has come to dominate Australians’ recollection of The Dismissal is a story of prescience, luck and the limitations of the TV news technology of the day.
Gough Whitlam, pictured here in 2008, looks at the original letter that dismissed him from office in 1975.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Sir John Kerr probably made his own decision to dismiss the Whitlam government much earlier than he acknowledged publicly while alive – but he came to this conclusion in discussion with others.
New insights into the dismissal of Gough Whitlam highlight the lingering complexities of any future effort to make Australia a republic.
NAA
In comments reported in a new book to mark the 40th anniversary of the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott offer sharply differing views.
The ALP national conference has lost its policymaking significance of the past. Instead it has become a reflection of the leader’s standing within the party.
The Whitlam government had a reformist vision whose origins lay in the future prime minister’s own wartime experience.
AWM
While serving in the RAAF, future prime minister Gough Whitlam led his first political campaign, agitating among his own squadron in support of the 1944 referendum.
The Franklin River which would prove to be Fraser’s environmental undoing.
anna/Flickr
Malcolm Fraser may be remembered for his failure to intervene in the Franklin Dam campaign, but he otherwise led a government distinguished for its environmental action.
Malcolm Fraser appeared more comfortable in the media gaze out of politics than in it.
AAP/NAA
Malcolm Fraser’s relationship with the Australian media waxed and waned, from enthusiasm, pragmatism and caution to something, in the end, approaching mutual respect and perhaps even affection.
Malcolm Fraser wasn’t a visionary like Paul Keating, but he did steady the Australian economic ship.
AAP/Luis Enrique Ascui
Malcolm Fraser’s economic style was pragmatic, but he resisted the ‘dries’ in his party.
Tom Uren gave a lifetime of service to his country: first in war, then as a campaigner for peace, a government minister and, in his later years, a mentor to many.
Australian Information Service 1983/National Archives of Australia
Tom Uren was a “Big Man” not only in stature but in his public life. Uren, who has died at the age of 93, was born into a working-class household. Typical of the 1920s and ‘30s, he had a limited formal…
Double J staff in the early days. The station’s been going strong for 40 years.
ABC Radio
Australia’s public youth radio station, Triple J, turns 40 today. On January 19 1975, Triple J’s AM predecessor, Double J, infamously burst onto Sydney’s airwaves with the track, You Just Like Me Cause…
Politics was very much on display during last week’s memorial service for former prime minister Gough Whitlam.
AAP/Brendon Thorne
Last week, I was one of a sea of Australians who rose to remember Gough Whitlam. Fitting its subject, the Whitlam memorial was sweeping. It was as much a grand story of Australia’s evolution since the…
The public response to the eulogies to Gough Whitlam testifies to the power of oratory that draws on and gives fresh life to memory.
AAP/Alan Porritt
In a playful rhetorical flourish at the Sydney Town Hall on Wednesday, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson monumentalised Gough Whitlam’s prime ministerial legacy, Monty Python-style: What did the Romans ever…
Noel Pearson’s speech has been hailed as one of the great Australian political speeches. What were its stylistic characteristics?
AAP Image/Fairfax Pool, Peter Rae
Gough Whitlam was a prime minister unsuccessful in three of his five federal election campaigns, including 1975’s extremely divisive contest. Somehow, though, his death has sparked an outpouring of kind…
Edward Gough Whitlam has passed on, leaving behind millions of citizens saddened by scores of eloquent obituaries reminding us how, once upon a time, Australian politics produced world-class leaders courageously…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne