In the shadow of Monash University’s Clayton campus landmark Menzies Building to its north and with the affluent bayside Melbourne suburbs to its south and west lie the flat lands of the federal seat of…
Kevin Rudd has imported three members of US president Barack Obama’s successful 2012 campaign team to advise on Labor’s September 7 re-election efforts. This announcement has already achieved one of the…
“ICAC, SHMY-CAC. My name is Kevin, I’m from Queensland and I’m here to help.” I know it’s not quite what the prime minister would say: I have taken a little licence with his words from 2007. But I think…
In his recent Quarterly Essay, Mark Latham compared Labor parliamentary representation to the rotten boroughs of the 18th century. Though union membership has fallen away, suggested Latham, union officials…
Today, a specially convened meeting of the Labor caucus will decide on proposed changes to how the party selects its parliamentary leader. The politics of leadership in Australia have been described as…
Treasurer Chris Bowen’s new blueprint for Labor party reform Hearts and Minds gives us the easy listening version of Paul Keating, just as Tony Abbott offers us the same for John Howard. The book provides…
On Monday, prime minister Kevin Rudd announced a series of proposals to change the way the Australian Labor Party selects its parliamentary leader. Under his proposal, incumbents can only be challenged…
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…
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…
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…
Julia Gillard has been a reasonably effective politician, but the political paradigm within which she has worked is approaching the end of its life. She has been aware of this but has struggled to develop…
If climate change features prominently in the federal election campaign, it will almost certainly be driven by the Coalition. Under Tony Abbott, the Coalition has long smelled blood in the water on climate…
Graham Richardson, the legendary Labor numbers man, pronounced last week that “if I was religious, I would pray that my long-held view that Labor will be slaughtered under Gillard’s leadership would be…
Among all the self-serving tattle from disgruntled cabinet ministers who felt impelled to resign last week, surely the stupidest was the attack on Julia Gillard supposedly promoting “class warfare”. The…
Labor starts this week still reeling from the “no show” leadership spill and its aftermath. Labor’s electorally disastrous polls are likely to get even worse following those events. Are there any ways…
After one of the more bizarre days in Australian politics, Julia Gillard remains as the prime minister of Australia. The question of leadership of the Labor Party has been a constant problem for the party…
The Daily Telegraph isn’t known for holding back. As Stephen Conroy discovered in an already infamous front page, if you’re in its firing line, you’ll know it. It’s a world where a relatively pragmatic…
It is ironic that just as our politics become increasingly presidential, so too do the two contending party leaders become increasingly unpopular. Indeed, both parties increasingly campaign as if the choice…
The termination of the ALP/Green alliance has been characterised by some sections of the media and the commentariat as a “divorce”. The language is interesting because it implies that there was genuine…
Greens leader Christine Milne’s announcement yesterday that the alliance between the Greens and Labor was over had more symbolic than practical implications for Australian politics. Senator Milne vowed…