BY ignoring the opinion pollsters and seeing off Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard might have believed she had finally bought the time she needed to reconstruct her reputation and, more importantly, her government’s re-election hopes.
Labor’s Queensland massacre – where a maxi cab would be more than sufficient to carry what’s left of the entire state party – only brings the daunting challenge ahead into sharper focus.
The Prime Minister needs to push back her own election date to as late as possible next year, to give her the time and space to …

THE celebrated psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said: “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
In many respects, former federal Labor leader Mark Latham is the self-appointed psychoanalyst of the Labor Party and he most certainly understands the darkness within the ALP.
A devoted student of the Labor Party and a talented writer, Latham reserves his harshest criticisms for those he describes as the “machine” men and women, who can be broadly defined as career politicians with little or no experience outside politics.
These so-called …

SAINT Patrick’s Day is a day to celebrate, but it also marks one of the most infamous incidents in Australian political history.
On March 17, 1948, in Brisbane, something very significant happened, something that deserves to be remembered – especially as Queensland gears up for a crucial state election.
On that day, Australia’s first and only Communist Party MP, Frederick (“Fred”) Woolnough Paterson, was savagely bashed by a plain-clothes policeman – almost certainly on the direct orders of authoritarian ALP state premier E.M. (“Ned”) Hanlon.
This brutal attack occurred while Fred Paterson was …

THE Supreme Court will rule today on whether The Australian Party can legally stand as an abbreviation of Katter’s Australian Party at Queensland’s March 24 election.
Such an abbreviation is, the latter argues, a form of discrimination.
Founded by the maverick federal Independent MP for the vast federal seat of Kennedy, Bob Katter, the party has announced that if its abbreviation is allowed to stand, it could challenge the result in up to 76 of the 89 seats in Queensland’s one-house parliament.
Katter’s attempts to change the way his party is represented on …

WARNINGS about the role of “faceless men” in the ALP have been a feature of modern Australian politics since 1963. That was the year in which Robert Menzies won a federal election by turning it into a virtual referendum directed against the power of such unelected apparatchiks. This abiding fascination with Labor’s faceless men peaked again on June 24, 2010.
Over the course of a single night, Australia got a new Labor Prime Minister courtesy of a party coup orchestrated by a cabal of sub-factional heavyweights.
Judged by Wednesday’s declaration of war …

THE Liberal National Party will almost certainly win government after the Queensland election on March 24, but it may prove to be a rather more difficult task than many pundits think.
To begin with, the state’s electoral boundaries favour Labor, giving Premier Anna Bligh a six-seat head start, and together with the benefits of incumbency her government is still not dead and buried.
Bligh is an experienced operator who is running an extremely tough campaign.
Because the LNP’s extra-parliamentary leader Campbell Newman is the frontrunner, he is under huge media pressure and scrutiny …

JULIA Gillard’s misguided attempts to shore up support for her leadership have virtually guaranteed that she will not lead Labor to the next election, and may not survive until this year’s budget.
Her decision to break the written contract she signed with Andrew Wilkie is clearly driven by backbench disgruntlement with the mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines demanded by Wilkie in return for his support after the 2010 election.
This was not some inconsequential agreement – it was an agreement struck by the Prime Minister to allow her to form government …

AFTER taking a record number of public submissions, the Australian Law Reform Commission has now released its final discussion paper on a new Classification Scheme.
The ALRC has come up with 44 proposals to reform classification and official censorship in Australia. Chief among these is a new Classification of Media Content Act. The main thrust of the commission’s proposals is that the online media environment has fundamentally changed the way that people access media and that soon it will be possible that all media will be available on one screen. Therefore …

ATTENDANCE at Alcoholics Anonymous is the best method of helping alcoholics remain sober. There are no dues or fees for membership in this unique organisation, which is entirely self-supporting. The only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is a desire, no matter how inchoate or half-hearted, to stop drinking.
In terms of long-term abstinence from alcohol and other drugs, AA has the numbers. Even so, not all alcoholics remain receptive to AA’s simple message that, for an alcoholic, it is the first drink that does the damage. No matter how long …

NOT very many Australians know that Andrew Robb chairs the federal Coalition policy development committee, with its deputy chairman being the former adviser to Peter Costello and now Victorian member for Casey, Tony Smith.
This important committee has been working overtime to ensure the Tony Abbott-led opposition will go to the next federal election with a policy platform that adds up politically, philosophically and fiscally. Systematically but unobtrusively and in the main under the political radar, Robb and Smith have been dotting their policy i’s and crossing their costing t’s.
After the …

WHEN John Howard first spoke of a relaxed and comfortable Australia 16 years ago, his critics labelled him small-minded and lacking vision.
But in the new year, this would strike a chord with many who are looking for stability and certainty in the face of the increasingly uncomfortable events circling us.
Every day we see media reports from around the globe painting a picture of instability. Whether it is financial and political upheaval in Greece and Italy, the Occupy protest movement, instability throughout the Middle East, or the possibilities of worldwide earthquakes, …