THE recent review of the Northern Territory intervention and the recommendation to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act in the NT were welcome news to the vast majority of Aborigines in Australia, who lead ordinary lives and who are not drunks or child abusers.
The suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act affected Aborigines living outside the prescribed areas just as much as those living in them. It damaged their self esteem and public standing around the country by saying they were so remiss in their roles as parents, guardians, friends and neighbours, …

THE date was Thursday, March 21, 1963. The time was just after midnight. The instigator of action was the famous political reporter Alan “The Red Fox” Reid, a loyal employee of anti-Labor media mogul Frank Packer.
The locale was the Hotel Kingston in Canberra, where a special conference of the Australian Labor Party had been convened to decide whether the party should endorse a new US communications base in Western Australia.
For weeks Reid had been writing articles in the Packer press (notably The Daily Telegraph, which much later was sold …

It’s worth remembering that Australia’s only coup d’état took place in Sydney at a time when alcohol was widely used as a currency in the fledgling colony of New South Wales.
On 26 January 1808, Governor William Bligh (of the mutiny on the Bounty fame) was forcibly deposed by George Johnston, Commander of the New South Wales Corps. Johnston led 400 armed soldiers — many of them young — up Bridge Street, Sydney to take Bligh prisoner in what soon became known as ‘The Rum Rebellion’. This was because control over …

IT is rare for a political party to achieve a 10 per cent turnaround in the opinion polls in just six months. But this is what has happened in Queensland, where that state’s newly merged Liberal-National Party, the LNP, has injected new life into conservative politics.
This is why, on one hand, the 10-year-old state Labor Government is becoming nervous, while on the other Malcolm Turnbull – aware of the role Queensland must play if he is to become prime minister – is effusive in his praise for the LNP. Indeed, …

THE sign of a civilised society is how its government looks after the marginalised, needy and impoverished.
By any meaningful definition, many Australian pensioners are living below the poverty line. Yet unless political pressure is brought to bear, our pensioners don’t look like getting a much-needed pay rise any time soon.
The changing of the guard in the federal Opposition allows for the possibility of Malcolm Turnbull and his Coalition taking a principled stand and, in so doing, embarrassing the Labor troika of Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard.
Opportunistically, but …

LUKE Slattery’s piece, “Blainey affair role hounds professor”, warrants serious attention.
The attack on Macintyre’s work as a historian for having being an “ex-communist” is gratuitous and foolish. What about all those ex-comms who turned to the Right?
The current denigration of Macintyre is redolent of the unprincipled attacks on Geoffrey Blainey after his Warrnambool speech in 1984.
Although Blainey and I differ markedly about politics, I was distressed by the attack on his work by a posse of Australian academics, as a direct result of his views about Asian immigration.
Macintyre has always …

LATE last month, Peter Costello was toasted to the rafters at a sumptuous event in Melbourne. Among Liberal true believers he is acclaimed as the main architect of Australia’s economic prosperity in the past 10 years.
Who knows, if he had become leader in June 2006, it could have been him and not Kevin Rudd sitting in the Prime Minister’s seat in the House of Representatives today. But then prime minister John Howard would have none of that and as we say, the rest is history. Tomorrow, Costello is launching his …

LATE last month, Peter Costello was toasted to the rafters at a sumptuous event in Melbourne. Among Liberal true believers he is acclaimed as the main architect of Australia’s economic prosperity in the past 10 years.
Who knows, if he had become leader in June 2006, it could have been him and not Kevin Rudd sitting in the Prime Minister’s seat in the House of Representatives today. But then prime minister John Howard would have none of that and as we say, the rest is history.
Tomorrow, …

ROB Oakeshott’s thumping win on Saturday in the NSW north coast federal seat of Lyne may have wide repercussions. The loss of the seat held by retiring Nationals leader Mark Vaile since 1993, and by the Country-National Party since 1949 when the seat was created, spells trouble federally for the Nationals.
Despite a strong performance in the June by-election for Gippsland (which is the Nationals heartland), Oakeshott’s crushing victory in Lyne is a clear example of how, if they are offered the choice of an independent candidate with a strong track …

AT the same time as Kevin Rudd’s popularity with electors remains solid, Labor is starting to hit glitches at a state level; a near-death experience in the Northern Territory and knife-edge polls in Western Australia show political incumbency is no longer an unambiguous advantage.
In the Sunshine State, Queenslanders are almost exactly one year away from a scheduled state poll. But already Labor insiders are working through the pros and cons of calling an early election.
Party pollsters following the Northern Territory and West Australian campaigns reveal that voters weren’t annoyed only …

There’s been a predictable black and white response over the last fortnight to former federal resources minister Ian Macfarlane’s advocacy of nuclear power as a realistic energy option for reducing greenhouse emissions.
But what has largely been ignored is the role of gas-fired energy generation.
The deleterious impact of emissions trading on our economy will be felt most severely in the Latrobe Valley of Victoria where such a scheme will result in significant job losses in a number of brown-coal fired power stations. The same applies to New South Wales, because …