How you judge today's federal budget depends what you think a budget is for. Conventional wisdom has it that the best budgets stimulate the most growth. Conventional cynicism says the winner budgets are the ones that give enough prizes to the right voters to lock in a majority come polling...

Last week, churches and church leaders around Australia intervened in the issue of sending asylum seekers, including children, to Nauru, following the High Court decision upholding the government's legal power to do so.

Beginning with St John's Cathedral in Brisbane, churches of many denominations across Australia offered sanctuary to these...

Our new PM is right to say there's never been a better time to be Australian but this also means that there's never been a better time for Australia to get on with the job of building a better shared future with our neighbours.

It would be too easy...

After 15 years of a deeply divisive and toxic debate over refugees, ordinary Australians have finally and decisively rejected the politics of fear. It is my hope that in doing so they will have also led our political leadership to a new and fairer place.

Certainly the...

Increasingly I find my country's past easier to explain than its present. Today's Australia confusingly lacks a coherent narrative or explanation for how we are doing things, and to what purpose.

The Australia I was born into in 1955 was politically tumultuous on the surface but at street level it...