Tony Wright is the National Affairs Editor of The Age. He has been based in the Canberra Press Gallery for 20 years, working for The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Bulletin before joining The Age in 2007. He has written two plays and two best-selling books, was named Magazine Feature Writer of the Year twice, has won several UN Media Peace Prizes and has been a Walkley Awards finalist five times.
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.
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.
As a protest, it was pretty lame, if loud and, for the demonstrators, satisfyingly disruptive.
This shambles was perfectly predictable and it makes you wonder about the quality of smarts in the government.
Forget the quaint view that the Senate is a retirement home for fogeys.
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..
Former prime minister Paul Keating is the latest public figure to lay into the besieged ABC, saying it it is failing as a news gathering organisation and was letting Australia down.
"I am fed up with people... calling me a racist when they cannot find one thing that I have said that is racist."
Any advice sugar-loving Barnaby Joyce might have on public health should be taken seriously. The man's a living miracle.
"They had taken all my guns, so I couldn't shoot myself, so I poured petrol over myself and walked into a fire".
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