Tim Dunlop was the author of two of Australia's most successful political blogs, The Road To Surfdom and Blogocracy.
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The government's agenda threatens to restructure the economy not for the benefit of the many but for enrichment of the few, and leave core values of fairness by the wayside, writes Tim Dunlop.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, manufacturing, automotive, abbott-tony
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Both parties are riven by internal disputes that have less to do with policy differences (that is, visions for how to make the country better) than with factional power.
Nothing has done more to undermine the credibility of the Labor party than these so-called "leadership" battles.
Major factional battles exist within the Coalition too, and they are driven by the same malaise: a disconnect from the electorate at large and an inability to articulate a vision of the national good outside their own obsessions.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-parliament, federal-elections, liberals, media, social-media, alp
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When successful businesses are paying such low wages that they find it necessary to ask for donations of food from customers in order to help out their employees, we have crossed the line between good economic management and social pathology.
It is not just a case of direct economic policies lowering taxes on the wealthy and redistributing national wealth upwards - though that happens in spades.
Something more insidious is at work. The very tools we use to assert ourselves as citizens against these special interests are themselves attacked and undermined.
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As Parliament returns, it is worth offering some correctives to the myths and misconceptions pervading the debate on politics and media.
Topics: abbott-tony, federal-government
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As obsessed as the media (still) is with Labor's leadership ructions, very little attention is given to the reasons for those ructions.
In ignoring them, journalists also ignore some of the major shifts that are occurring in our body politic, including in the Liberal Party.
The two major parties will continue to dominate our politics, but more independents and small parties will emerge as voters grope desperately for alternatives.
Topics: government-and-politics, liberals, alp, unions
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Labor faces a difficult choice, but ultimately protecting the norms of democratic governance is more important than taking a symbolic stand against repealing the price on carbon.
Topics: climate-change, federal-government, alp
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With a cabinet better suited to fighting the culture wars than dealing with reality, Tony Abbott has given us insight into his particular brand of conservative malaise.
Topics: abbott-tony, federal-government
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Power doesn't want you to feel like you can make a difference. It doesn't want you to engage or organise or congregate or realise how much you have in common with others.
It will do everything it can to disrupt any feeling of solidarity you might develop, any sense of common purpose you feel forming, any notion you might conjure that there is something bigger and material and worthwhile and achievable in the course of a normal human life.
Power wants you to feel that there is no alternative. That you have to go along to get along. That all good things come to those who wait.
Topics: federal-elections
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In our response to the global population shifts that Australia itself is not immune to, we must do better than hive refugees off to overseas slums-in-waiting.
Topics: population-and-demographics, world-politics, government-and-politics, refugees
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The Daily Telegraph's front page failed to recognise readers are no longer passive recipients of news but active members of a thriving news ecosystem.
Topics: print-media, federal-elections, social-media, rudd-kevin
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As barriers to trade have evaporated over the last 30 years, barriers to the movements of people have, by and large, remained.
As such, "national security" is now the last shot in the locker of governments who have actively ceded control of nearly everything else they do to corporations.
It is the one major area of public policy where an otherwise disempowered government (of whatever political persuasion) gets to tell its people that "we we will decide" what's going on.
Topics: refugees, business-economics-and-finance
