Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed over the weekend that he will use the parliamentary summer break to review his paid parental leave (PPL) scheme, which has so far proven to be a large political liability…
The government has stepped back from its A$7 proposed co-payment for visiting the GP but still aims to skin the Medicare cat, putting the onus on doctors to send a $5 price signal to non-concessional patients…
Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten will make their first joint appearance to promote the constitutional recognition of Australia’s first people on Thursday night. The function, in the Redfern area, is a dinner…
University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker and Michelle Grattan discuss the week in politics including the end of parliamentary year, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s appearance on the ABC’s 7:30…
Deputy National Party leader Barnaby Joyce might mangle the language but he is willing, inside the government and often publicly as well, to call things as they are. So amid Tony Abbott making all sorts…
Whoever is advising Prime Minister Tony Abbott understands something of the place of the larrikin in the Australian national consciousness. Abbott’s threat to shirtfront Russian President Vladimir Putin…
Labor’s state election victory in Victoria has fatally undermined Melbourne’s most controversial tunnel, the now-doomed East-West Link, with new Premier Daniel Andrews pledging to rip up the contracts…
Had someone told me last summer that I would be defending public universities on the first day of next summer I would have ridiculed the idea. Somehow I believed what the Coalition wrote in early 2013…
After a shocker week in Canberra and a Liberal turf-out in Victoria, Tony Abbott conspicuously changed the tone of his government’s rhetoric. At his long Monday news conference he no longer behaved like…
After Daniel Andrews and Labor’s decisive victory in the Victorian state election at the weekend, there has been – not unexpectedly – a welter of post-election opinion trying to account for the rather…
Tony Abbott is appointing the former chief of the Australian Federal Police, Tony Negus, as Australia’s new high commissioner to Canada. Meanwhile, career diplomat Paul Grigson is being sent as ambassador…
In his statement on Labor’s Victorian election win, Tony Abbott referred to just one policy issue: the East West Link, which was a central Liberal promise. The Prime Minister declared he was “determined…
During Thursday’s extremely unruly Question Time, when Speaker Bronwyn Bishop ejected a record 18 (all Labor) members, Tony Abbott was asked whether he’d visit Victoria on Friday, the eve of the state…
Tony Abbott’s reference to removing “barnacles” from his government has become the Canberra chatter. In technical terms, according to senior government sources who’ve had nautical advice since the Prime…
Behind the flag-waving and cheers surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Australia are serious questions about the safety and security implications of Australia’s agreement to…
With the polling bad, some of his strongest media backers excoriating him and his pants on fire over the “no cuts to the ABC” pledge, Tony Abbott has assured his Coalition partyroom that, bar a couple…
Throughout his prime-ministership, which ran from 1996 to 2007, John Howard’s perspective on climate change was informed by geopolitics more than science. The Kyoto Protocol, the key international climate…
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, usually sharp-witted and articulate, entered an Orwellian zone this week. Trying to explain away Tony Abbott’s pre-election promise of “no cuts to the ABC or SBS…
For the roughly 450,000 people of Indian origin in Australia, the highlight of Narendra Modi’s first visit as Prime Minister of India to Australia was his address at an Indian community reception in Sydney…
When Frances Abbott’s private scholarship award was “exposed”, when poetry professor Barry Spurr was outed for his inflammatory emails and when Senator Nova Peris was devastated by the leaking of her private…