Abbott's model to wreck a government may come back to bite him
PETER HARTCHER Tony Abbott is promising again and again that he will lead a 'methodical, measured, calm' government. But he's overlooking something. He's just finished writing a rip-roaring new guidebook on how to be a successful opposition.
The rights and wrongs of designer humans
Neil McMahon Designer babies - their gender, personality traits and skin colour potentially chosen by genetic testing - are a looming reality. But are we ready to confront this minefield of ethical issues?
Tough road ahead for rookie
DARREN GRAY He always paid the rent on time before he became a home owner with his wife. And when the landlord came to visit, the rental property was always clean and tidy. Out in the paddock and in the dairy with the cows at milking time, Victoria's likely new senator Ricky Muir was a diligent and capable worker. One who was punctual and trustworthy.
Walking on the wild side of Senate history
TONY WRIGHT As Australians digest a menu of new senators who appear as disparate as the crowd on a Saturday night at the Birdsville races, some of the patrons armed, it's worth remembering that the Senate has long produced wild surprises.
Hello happy voters
MATT WADE Everyone knows there's more to national success than gross domestic product numbers.
The great budget shuffle
Tom Allard and Peter Martin Rudd made the plea repeatedly in a blitzkrieg series of appearances late this week.
Lost in hype: five burning issues forgotten in the campaign
Daniel Flitton and Shane Green Winston Churchill called elections the indispensable education of a politician - and having lost and won a few, he was well schooled. Modern campaigners work tirelessly to shape the agenda, using relentless media appearances, shopping centre walks, stunts against carefully chosen backdrops and a blizzard of press releases to keep the message on the themes most favourable to their candidate and harmful to their opponents.
Salinger's secrets: the man behind the legend
Andrew Purcell 'I'd have this rule that nobody could do anything phony when they visited me.'
The fight for a forest paradise
MICHAEL BACHELARD Sumatra is the only place where orang-utans, tigers, elephants and rhinoceros are found together.
Beguiled by the beautiful, our obsession with the body has worn a little thin
Lionel Shriver The body is a card we've been arbitrarily dealt. Looking in the mirror, we recognise ourselves and don't.
Affluenza Epidemic
Tom Allard 'We can expect bitter conflict within our society, and unhappiness about our institutions.'
So bad they're good: films we love to mock
GARRY MADDOX The world's worst movies are so bad they're good again - and crowds are flocking.
Here comes the sun: power to the people
Ben Cubby and Peter Hannam Here's a bright idea: what if, instead of buying solar panels,companies put them on your roof free.
Fathers, stand up for your children, always
Sarah Smith * I had just finished work when my sister rang with the news that he was no longer conscious.
Careful what you say, the bins have ears
LUCY BATTERSBY Rubbish bins tracking pedestrians as they walk along the street sound like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Tenacious Milne walks the thin green line
SHANE GREEN On September 7, will the Greens remain the third force in Australian politics?
The evolution of Abbott
MARK BAKER It's just shy of 7 o'clock on a crisp winter's morning in Geelong. Tony Abbott is on his way to rescue the Great Ocean Road from the ravages of man and nature - or at least to rescue the seat of Corangamite from the ravages of Labor - with a quick photo opportunity and the promise of a $25 million handout.
Woeful waste or welcome change: leave scheme divides critics
MATT WADE The daily juggle of working parents, branded a ''barbecue stopper'' by John Howard more than a decade ago is still potent politics, as the 2013 election campaign shows.
Lights out at the house of power
TONY WRIGHT Opinion An angular figure looms out of the subtropical evening, a big moon casting its light on the Brisbane River. ''What's going on here?'' inquires Bob Carr, Australia's Foreign Minister, blinking at the swirl of people brandishing banners.
Me TV: the idiot box gets smart and personal
MICHAEL IDATO Two years after it launched its first line of commercial television transceivers in 1948, the Zenith Radio Corporation unveiled a device that would come to fundamentally alter the audience's relationship with the idiot box: the remote control.
On being Rudd
Deborah Snow On June 24, 2010, a first-term prime minister who'd won a thumping election victory two-and-a-half years earlier was cut down by his own party, without warning, in one of the most seismic events in Australia's political history.
High stakes as PNG's new strongman bets on asylum
MARK BAKER Early last week, at the height of the controversy over Australia's plan to permanently export its asylum seeker problem to Papua New Guinea and neighbouring Nauru, PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill decided to tackle some of his fiercest domestic critics head on.
Crimes at sea: the dark side of cruise ships
CHRIS JOHNSTON The Australian industry is dominated by a corporation, nicknamed ''Carnivore'' by its detractors.
As Cairo counts its dead, peace remains remote
RUTH POLLARD The smell of death hangs heavily in the air at Al-Iman Mosque in Nasr City. There are bodies as far as the eye can see and the blocks of ice laid on their chests to slow down the decomposition fight a losing battle with the intense summer heat.
The man who wants to start a conversation about racism
RACHEL BROWNE Tim Soutphommasane wants to encourage others to think deeply about national identity.
Ashton Kutcher
Kutcher the dude for the job
NICK MILLER In his Steve Jobs biopic, Ashton Kutcher may not only have found a role that will lead him into delayed adulthood, he has quite possibly found a project that could save his soul.
The battle over human nature
Steve Connor Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition? Some scholars believe the answer is yes, but new research suggests not.
Even in the safest country in the world, birth is a risk
Catherine Naylor Despite being one the safest countries in the world in which to give birth, pregnancy complications are on the rise in Australia.
The perils of remote living
Catherine Naylor In remote parts of Australia, the outcomes for women giving birth are not as good. The death rate for indigenous mothers is 2.5 times higher than for other Australians.
A forgotten war, a haunted land
We make much, us Australians, of our wars. But what of the Eumeralla War?
All too much: the people who can't let go
Konrad Marshall When you visit Linda Sexton at her home in the Yarra Ranges town of Seville, she gives you directions not just to her street address, but to her door.
Flimflam man v Dr No
Michael Gordon, Tony Wright and Jacqueline Maley Behind the principal ringmasters in this election campaign are teams that work in shifts, know how to exploit social media and exude the killer instinct.
Campaigning by stealth
DAN HARRISON As the unnamed election date draws nearer and camera crews begin staking out the road to Yarralumla, voters could be forgiven for already feeling campaign fatigue.
Sci-tech
Dirt story: the past in their hands
Nicky Phillips Were it not for satellite technology, Dr Michael Archer doubts he would be on an isolated outcrop in north-west Queensland, ankle deep in red dirt.
People's Pope brings winds of change
Barney Zwartz Vogue magazine recently reported that Pope Francis' humility and sobriety have wooed some of the most notable fashion designers away from their ostentatious aesthetic.
Much ado about nothing: the peptide they say never worked
Natasha Wallace There is much confusion about the significance of the banned peptide at the centre of the AFL doping scandal - and perhaps that is not so surprising. The company behind AOD-9604 knew back in 2007, after six clinical trials of 925 patients, that the drug had completely failed to treat obesity. But after burning through some $50 million developing the drug, Metabolic Pharmaceuticals Pty Ltd, which owns the patent, has continued to spruik its so-called body-enhancing benefits.
Asylum Inc: burgeoning business of detaining the unwanted
Deborah Snow and Matt O'sullivan In another life, nearly a decade ago, Colonel Chris Manning was the head of Britain's armed forces in Afghanistan. Today he works out of Melbourne as an executive for sprawling multinational G4S, the company contracted to provide security services on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, soon to be home to rising numbers of boat-borne asylum seekers thanks to Kevin Rudd's new hardline policy.
Can Labor overcome Obeid's malign presence?
Anne Davies, Sean Nicholls and Linton Besser 'There are two types of people in the Labor Party,' says one senior NSW MP. ''Those who bent the knee and kissed Eddie's ring, and those who kept their distance because they thought him so odious.'
Political urgency gives rise to a new (air) cargo cult
Deborah Snow and Matt O'sullivan Kevin Rudd's new ''get them to PNG'' policy has unleashed a frenetic wave of activity among airline and transport companies.What the government needed urgently in advance of the looming federal election was physical proof of its tough new line being implemented. Photos of planes disgorging the contents of their bellies onto the tarmac in Port Moresby couldn't come soon enough for Canberra.
PNG gamble depends on who blinks first
Mark Kenny Nothing, it is said, succeeds like success. Kevin Rudd's undeclared stop-the-boats policy turns on that very mechanism.
Nanny state set for royal update
STEPHANIE BUNBURY Royal nannies used to come in teams of nursemaid, under-nurses and chambermaids, all enforcing an iron-clad routine that remained in force whether the royal parents were in the country or, as frequently was the case, touring the Empire.
Rates may favour Rudd but China is the key to Australia's economy
MATT WADE Interest rates have been kind to Kevin Rudd the campaigner. They were going up when he first ran for PM in 2007. That year, the Reserve Bank took the controversial decision to lift rates during the election campaign, delivering an electoral blow to Rudd's opponent, John Howard.
The world's oldest pyramid, or are they dreaming?
MICHAEL BACHELARD It has been raining at Gunung Padang, and the grass on the mountain's precipitous eastern slope is slick with water and mud. Geologist Danny Hilman, though, is undeterred. While others slip and fall around him, he trudges expertly down this hill tucked away among the volcanoes 120 kilometres south of Jakarta to show off the two big holes he's dug.
Once an Olympic champion, a hero becomes mortal
RICK FENELEY The Olympic medallist Scott Miller once rubbed shoulders with James Packer and shock jock Alan Jones. Now he's behind bars. Fairfax Media considers the case amid the ongoing debate about elite athletes and their use of drugs.
The rock'n'roll of wiser politics
TONY WRIGHT It seemed hardly surprising that Mick Jagger's 70th birthday made front-page news yesterday: for a fair slice of my generation, the moment was both confronting and celebratory.
Step right up: it's four days of meet and geek
MICHAEL IDATO Comic-Con has grown in three decades to become one of the most important calendar dates.
Meet the Rudds, where politics is a family affair
SHANE GREEN There is political strategy in the presentation of the Rudd family and Jessica Rudd is no bit player.
The truth about carbon
Adam Morton and Nick Miller The big question for Australia is how to best play its part in the push to tackle climate change.
Solving the riddle of an ancient script
Margalit Fox It was one of the most captivating mysteries of the modern age and required three detectives.
Campaign will help Top End kids put the right foot forward
MICHAEL GLEESON The boys of Wadeye, one of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia, love their footy.
