WHEN Julia Gillard launched the Labor government’s response to the Gonski report she said her centrepiece was an “an extra $14.5 billion in public investment over the next six years”.
Whether the Prime Minister actually plans on spending this money or not is largely becoming irrelevant – chances are that both she and her loyal deputy, Wayne Swan, will be looking for new jobs come September 15.

According to opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey, the promise of “extra” funding was essentially “a slipshod attempt to bribe more Australians into voting for a …

MEDICINAL use of cannabis should be permitted in Australia.
In 2013, we should not still be merely discussing this possibility. On Wednesday, a NSW parliamentary committee, chaired by Nationals upper house MP Sarah Mitchell, unanimously recommended that medicinal cannabis be permitted for some people with certain terminal conditions.

At present, 18 states in the US allow medical marijuana and a further 10 are considering it. Apart from providing genuine alternatives to existing medicines, this approach has kick-started a plethora of scientific research on cannabis by an industry that has until recently been …

JULIA Gillard is desperately searching for a legacy to establish her place in history beyond the fact that she is the first woman to hold the prime ministership.
As matters stand, she is destined to be remembered as the Labor leader who knifed a popular but flawed leader in Kevin Rudd, lost Labor’s majority at the 2010 election and then (if current polls are any indication) led Labor to its worst ever loss at the 2013 election.

The deterioration in the nation’s finances under Gillard’s watch and her failure to balance the …

The Way We Approach Higher Education Needs To Change, writes ROSS FITZGERALD
ALTHOUGH I very much enjoy writing political satires such as my co-authored ‘Fools’ Paradise: Life In An Altered State’, set in the fictitious University of Mangoland, sadly neither my recent suggestions to cut the number of universities and vice-chancellors in Australia – particularly in the regions – nor the 2008 Bradley Review recommendation that our university sector requires serious structural change, were satires.
As the now publicly declared cuts of $2.4 billion to higher education funding and John Daley’s recent …

IT is hard to avoid the impression that Julia Gillard is a prime minister in waiting – waiting to be dumped on September 14.
Though many may now regard her government as being in caretaker mode, Labor is still scrambling with whatever it has left to convince Australians it deserves a renewed term in Canberra.
With the voting public seemingly not listening to the Prime Minister any more, and the continuing malaise in opinion polls that has Labor wallowing around a 30 per cent primary vote, it suggests our citizenry gave up …

Labors fractional sub-factions active in the west
Factional manoeuvring is alive and well in the Labor Party.
The latest prime example occurred on Monday last week, at a meeting of the West Australian state executive. The headline story coming out of the nights proceedings in Perth was the choice of Joe Bullock to head Labor’s Senate ticket for the federal election. His success precipitated the retirement of Senator Mark Bishop, who no longer could get a winnable spot on the ticket.
The West Australian executive also had to fill a …

UNLESS there is an electoral miracle, the Gillard government will lose badly on September 14.
The election will be potentially devastating for Labor, especially in states like NSW and Queensland where it will lose some of its most talented members and possibly several senior ministers including Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer Wayne Swan.
In the aftermath Labor will need to use common sense and a strategic approach to rebuild the party. Indeed it needs to start thinking about that now, otherwise a coalition government led by Tony Abbott will be in office …

FORGET Simon Crean and Kim Beazley. Forget Joan Kirner and Carmen Lawrence. To my mind, the most talented Labor politician never to be prime minister of Australia was Edward Granville “Red Ted” Theodore, who became premier of Queensland and state treasurer on October 22, 1919. Exactly 10 years later, Theodore became federal treasurer in the ill-fated ALP government of James Scullin.
His Labor credentials were impeccable. Born in Adelaide on December 29, 1884, Theodore – who was of Romanian background – left school at 12 to gain work in the mines …

IN his address to the Sydney Institute on March 15, Tony Abbott announced that if he wins the federal election in September, “Australia will have a prime minister for indigenous affairs”.
He explained that all government agencies working on issues to do with Aboriginal Australia would in his new administration report to the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
The energetic Opposition Leader regularly spends one week each year doing volunteer work in remote communities in the Northern Territory and the fact that he allocated a full one-hour address to indigenous issues …

In a world of instant global connection, regional university fiefdoms need educating, writes ROSS FITZGERALD
Here’s something about which Craig Emerson, the new federal Minister for Tertiary Education, may care to ponder. On close examination, it seems that the Australian Regional Universities Network has things both right and wrong.
RUN is right to highlight the importance of our universities to regional Australia, but wrong in stressing supposed regional economic impact as their key indicator of success.
On the face of it, $2.1billion in gross domestic product, $1.2billion in household income, and …

Fifty years ago today, ‘The Canberra Times’ shed some fascinating light on the debut performance of the Australian Labor Party’s famed faceless men.
The notion that faceless forces control the ALP is deep seated. In its present form it originated in the wake of a special meeting, back in March 1963, of Labor’s federal party conference in Canberra. The special conference was called to decide party policy on a proposed US radio communications base at Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia. After meeting for over three days at Canberra’s Hotel Kingston, the …