TWO things are clear. In this year’s federal election Queensland will be the most crucial state, followed by NSW. To win seats off the ALP, let alone become prime minister, Tony Abbott will need to beat Kevin Rudd’s slick campaigning style and election techniques, most of which the Prime Minister learned in Queensland.
The issue for Abbott now is to do the in depth homework to position himself with a tactical and policy armoury to lead in to the actual campaign. He needs especially to understand how campaigns have been run …

Dr H. V. Evatt, who led the federal Australian Labor Party from 1951 to 1960, had  been a high-profile world figure during World War II and had served a term as an early president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Doc Evatt, notoriously, was a disastrous leader , the great Labor split of the 1950s occurred on his watch , but what is less known is that his political career was in difficulties even before he became leader. These difficulties arose from his failure to reconcile the competing demands of global diplomacy …

JUST before his ministerial responsibilities were significantly reduced, Peter Garrett made one of Australia’s great political understatements.
The former Midnight Oil frontman said of Labor’s insulation program: “We’re seeing a relatively small number of complaints in the system, given the scale of the system, about 0.5 per cent of complaints given the totality of the system. It has been a very successful program . . .” Two weeks later he was demoted and the program was cancelled.
As Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne pointed out last week, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd …