- Video duration
- 01:46
Vote counting - why so long?
The votes are cast, but counting them is no simple task. Peter Martin explains the process - and why it takes so long.
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.
George of the political jungle
It is an office that carries more than the usual political risk faced by ministers.
Wait and see approach on Syria
Given his wild campaign statements, anything is possible when it comes to how Trump may change America's foreign policy
ABCC an expensive deliverance
The government has ignored the national interest in favour of simply doing 'something' by year's end.
Aborigines still fighting for their unpaid wages
Economic racism against Indigenous Australians hasn't yet been consigned to history.
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.
The economic crunch that could usher in an equality revolution
Men will have to step into traditionally female roles and claim them.
Rotten fruit: Australia's politicians fail those who feed the cities
Most weekends I flee the big city and drive for hours through country districts, streaming through forests, across wide plains and alongside coastal scrub, soothing my way back to where I came from long ago.
Parliament House fence is unfortunate but unfortunately we need it
It is an unfortunate reality that the march of security measures tends to move in one direction only.
Star-struck MPs revisit their teens with visit from Van Damme
Standing inside the hallowed walls of Australia's Parliament, one of the last action heroes, learnt something.
Superglue? Screaming? Call that a protest?
As a protest, it was pretty lame, if loud and, for the demonstrators, satisfyingly disruptive.
Gas tax inquiry is moment of clarity for Scott Morrison
Australia is giving away 85.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for free. Well, to be sold by fossil fuel companies to Japan, Korea and China.
Counting your chickens a poor idea when they're headless chooks
This shambles was perfectly predictable and it makes you wonder about the quality of smarts in the government.
Turnbull delivers lesson on politics of the centre
It was a rare glimpse of the huge forces within the black hole of the current Senate, and a tutorial in the revived art of governing for results by Malcolm Turnbull.
The Senate: Hinch finds it's no place for sensitive old men
Forget the quaint view that the Senate is a retirement home for fogeys.
George Brandis damage: the central question for Turnbull
The responsibility for integrity assurance now moves to the Prime Minister.
Great Barrier Reef suffers worst ever bleaching event: study
Your personally curated news with six things you need to know before you get going.
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..
A plague on both your houses: Fairfax Ipsos shows minor parties prospering
A plague on both your houses, Labor and Liberal, is the evidence of today's Farirfax Ipsos poll for the two main parties. Both have suffered a slump in their primary vote.
Malcolm, Mr Zero, Turnbull and the all-time high flight of voters to minor parties
Your personally curated news with six things you need to know before you get going.
These numbers reveal an underwhelmed and disengaged electorate
Forget post-truth. This is the era of post-hope, where the instinct of voters is to give the finger to an established order.
The Greens will cop it for their new drugs policy. But they're right
There has perhaps never been a more obvious, more protracted and more destructive public policy failure in the history of democracy than the war on drugs.
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?
How Turnbull can shape up for the new year
If the prime minister and his government are to properly revive their fortunes in 2017 they need to become a whole lot better.
George Brandis is unfit to sit at the apex of the nation's legal system
If he did what has been alleged, he ought to go.
When words fail
Peter Dutton found himself in unfamiliar territory this week, cast as the victim of the "tricky language" of Bill Shorten.
Malcolm mouse is not for turning
Voters now understand that the 'real' Turnbull will never emerge.
Australia's budgetary cognitive dissonance
Peter Costello delivered the last federal budget surplus on May 8, 2007.
Tax dodgers are also debate dodgers
We don't have a budget deficit problem; we just have a spineless politician problem.
Donald Trump turns down intelligence briefings as top aide backs a Secretary of State who will travel less
Your personally curated news with six things you need to know before you get going.
- Video duration
- 03:40
Campaign highlights - and lowlights
The hurly-burly of the 2016 election campaign, as seen through the eyes of Fairfax reporters and photographers.