Mark William Latham (born 28 February 1961), an author and former Australian politician, was leader of the Federal Parliamentary Australian Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition from December 2003 to January 2005.

Latham captured national attention and, initially, high levels of public approval with his policies and unconventional approach, but also attracted controversy surrounding his past. In the October 2004 federal election, Latham was defeated by then-incumbent Prime Minister John Howard. Deteriorating relations with his party and ill health saw him resign as Leader on 18 January 2005.

In September 2005, Latham released The Latham Diaries, in which he attacked many of his former colleagues and members of the media, as well as condemning the general state of political life in Australia. He has since published A Conga Line of Suckholes, a regular column in the Australian Financial Review and Spectator Australia and an essay for The Monthly.

Latham was born in Ashcroft, a suburb of south-western Sydney in New South Wales. He was educated at the Hurlstone Agricultural High School, where he was dux, and at the University of Sydney, where he graduated with a degree in economics. He worked at the Green Valley Hotel for 2 years. He was also a research assistant to the former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, which included working on the latter's book The Whitlam Government.

Kevin Michael Rudd (born 21 September 1957) is an Australian politician who was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010. He also served as the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2010 to 2012. A member of the Australian Labor Party, Rudd has served in the House of Representatives since the 1998 federal election, representing Griffith, Queensland.

Rudd was born in Queensland and grew up on a dairy farm. He joined the Australian Labor Party at the age of 15 and was dux of Nambour State High School in 1974. He studied an arts degree in Asian studies at the Australian National University, majoring in Chinese language and Chinese history. In 1981, he married Thérèse Rein and they have three children. He worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs from 1981 and from 1988 he was Chief of Staff to the Queensland Labor Opposition Leader and later Premier, Wayne Goss. After the Goss government lost office in 1995, Rudd was hired as a Senior China Consultant by the accounting firm KPMG Australia.

Robert Manne (born 31 October 1947) is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne (BA) and the University of Oxford (BPhil) during the 1960s and 1970s. His university teaching focuses on twentieth-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism, and Australian politics, and he has undertaken research in areas such as censorship, anti-semitism, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, Australia's involvement in the Iraq war, the Stolen Generations, and the "history wars" of the 1990s.

He is married to journalist and social philosopher Anne Manne.

Manne's allegiances within the Australian political scene have moved from left to right, then back to left again; he titled a compendium of his political essays Left, Right, Left. Between 1989 and 1997 Manne edited the conservative magazine Quadrant, resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. Since Manne had been appointed to the position of editor on the strength of his previous anti-Communist publications and his reputation as a conservative, there was widespread anger among some people associated with Quadrant during his editorship that he was trying to push the magazine to the left. Since leaving the magazine he has published various attacks on it and upon his predecessors, Peter Coleman and Roger Sandall, and successors, P. P. McGuinness and Keith Windshuttle as editors. In 1996 he published a widely discussed and cited book, The Culture of Forgetting, which explored the controversy surrounding Helen Demidenko's 1994 Miles Franklin Award winning novel about the Holocaust, The Hand that Signed the Paper.

John Winston Howard, OM, AC, SSI, (born 26 July 1939) was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies.

Howard was a member of the House of Representatives from 1974 to 2007, representing the Division of Bennelong, New South Wales. He served as Treasurer in the Fraser government of from 1977 to 1983. He was Leader of the Liberal Party and Coalition Opposition from 1985 to 1989, which included the 1987 federal election against Bob Hawke. He was re-elected as Leader of the Opposition in 1995.

Howard led the Liberal-National coalition to victory at the 1996 federal election, defeating Paul Keating's Labor government and ending a record 13 years of Coalition opposition. The Howard Government was re-elected at the 1998, 2001 and 2004 elections, presiding over a period of strong economic growth and prosperity. Major issues for the Howard Government included taxation, industrial relations, immigration, the Iraq war, and Aboriginal relations. Howard's coalition government was defeated at the 2007 election by the Labor Party led by Kevin Rudd. Howard also lost his own parliamentary seat at the election; he was the second Australian Prime Minister, after Stanley Bruce in 1929, to do so.

Chris Kenny is a retired American soccer defender who played professionally in the North American Soccer League and Major Indoor Soccer League.

Kenny graduated from McCluer High School. He attended Florissant Valley Community College where he was a 1981 junior college soccer All American. He then transferred to St. Louis University where he was a 1983 Second Team All American soccer player. He was inducted into the Billikens Athletic Hall of Fame in 1995.

In October 1983, the Los Angeles Lazers selected Kenny with the second overall pick of the 1983 Major Indoor Soccer League draft. He signed with the Chicago Sting of the North American Soccer League, playing for them in during the 1983-1984 NASL indoor season. He then saw time in four games during the 1984 NASL outdoor season as the Sting won the league championship. The team released him in November 1984. He then signed with the St. Louis Steamers where he saw time in seven games during the 1985-1986 MISL season. During the 1988 off season, Kenny moved to the Kansas City Comets.