Federal Politics

The policy quagmire of school education is crying out for Treasury's guiding hand.

Education efficiency should start with Grattan compromise

If Treasury wants to start acting more like economists than accountants, a good place to start would be to urge its political masters to seize on the opportunity presented by the school funding "compact" proposed by the Grattan Institute.

Clive Palmer was one of the year's biggest losers in more ways than one.

The highlights, lowlights and lowlifes of Parliament 2016

It was the year a freshly recycled Liberal leader, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, took his Coalition to an election and suffered a near fatal gutser. Herewith are some of the awards for achievements – both above and mostly below the call of political duty in 2016.

Senator Pauline Hanson is not as happy as she appears on her Christmas poster.

Diversity in One Nation, where views collide

One Nation is a very democratic party. So democratic, indeed, that its parliamentarians apparently don't discuss with each other what the party's stance might be on legislation, and then publicly disagree..

The ripples of Donald Trump's victory are challenging long-established norms of western politics.

We've fallen from the audacity of hope to the audacity of grope

How many votes do you reckon Kevin Rudd lost when it was revealed he had gone into a seedy New York strip club known as Scores in a drunken manhattan bar crawl? Or what about Donald J Trump? How many do you imagine he lost from the notorious bus tape where he was recorded boasting of preying on and sexually assaulting women?

'As an exemplar of calm reason and restraint, Peter Dutton is about as convincing as Tony Abbott would be leading ...

When words fail

Peter Dutton found himself in unfamiliar territory this week, cast as the victim of the "tricky language" of Bill Shorten.