• Recent Posts

  • Entitlement
  • 2016: The fracturing
  • A mini Menzies ice age
  • Shock!
  • Equality – an update

• From the archives

  The last six years have shown that what asylum seekers have more to be concerned about is an insecure, out of control political class that targets the most vulnerable to make itself look in command.

  - Sovereignty

  “We will decide” was a phoney bit of Australian unilateralism made possible at a time of that phoney bit of US unilateralism, the War on Terror.

  - The New Regionalism

  How do you change racial provisions in the Constitution when the entire infrastructure of land rights is based on it?

  - Caught in a racial trap

  Politics is becoming more cyclical, but only because the nature of politics is changing from what it was in the 20th century.

  - The problem of the “political cycle”

• Essay and Book reviews

  Latham is articulating a search for a new relationship of politics to society, based not on its representation, but on intervention on a degraded basis. You have been warned.

  Not Dead Yet by Mark Latham

  In reality under this complaint about the media lurks a political argument that is highly revealing about the mindset of the political class today.

  Sideshow by Lindsay Tanner

  Here is someone working for the ABC, from a Labor background as Hawke’s press secretary, who has written about the rise and fall of a Labor Prime Minister with all the distortions and omissions worthy of the most disingenuous right wing hack.

  The Party Thieves by Barrie Cassidy

  The most bizarre defence of the two party system comes over what for Megalogenis is the most personal – immigration.

  Trivial Pursuit by George Megalogenis

  Can Australian politics be that insubstantial?

  Confessions of a Faceless Man by Paul Howes
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Australia may be ranking 14th or whatever, but international diplomacy is not the City to Bay Fun Run. No-one cares how far down you are in the ranking, you are either in the leading pack or not, and Australia is not.

Pushing a merger allows Nelson to turn the Liberals’ irrelevant ideological debate into an irrelevant organisational debate about whether to merge with a rump party in permanent decline.

Given it was written by a political reporter who has spent so long cheering the ALP, Alan Ramsay’s latest article shows a remarkable naivety of how that party works and, indeed, of politics in general.

The row about the carers’ bonus is a sign that government strategy to create an inflation scare so as to clamp down on ALP spending expectations has largely run its course.

This is not a honeymoon, this a realignment of Australian politics.

Howard’s problem was that not only had the union movement clearly had its day but we also had here a Labor Prime Minister to tell everyone the fact.

Right-wing cultural ‘warriors’ like Ackerman may comfort themselves that Rudd’s government has so far been about making symbolic gestures, but in reality he has been doing the reverse.

• 

• Key Posts of the Winter

  If words are now deeds, it seems the only responsible guardians of them from the public are the politicians they are supposed to elect.

  - Words and deeds

  The supreme irony of the Brexit vote was that a result that was supposed to be about the sovereignty of the UK Parliament must now be enacted by said Parliament that has no interest in doing so.

  - The confusions of anti-politics: Brexit – an update

  The first thing that should be dismissed is the idea that MPs should have a conscience vote on this, or any other issue. It’s rubbish.

  - Equality

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