ON January 5, a new state Labor leader will be elected in NSW. Had rank-and-file members had a vote, deputy leader Linda Burney would almost certainly have run and, in my opinion, would have walked it in.
Unfortunately the Labor caucus alone will decide the NSW leadership, because a plebiscite cannot be held within six months of a state election.
The ALP introduced a vote for members in the election of its national parliamentary leader. Burney’s mentor, the Labor Left’s national leader Anthony Albanese, trounced Bill Shorten by a margin of nearly …
AT this time of year, many Australians find themselves in trouble with the booze. But the silly season merely accentuates what is already a massive problem.
Why, then, do our governments respond so inadequately to helping people addicted to alcohol and other drugs?
Private, non-government orgÂÂanisations and government-funded treatment centres don’t have the capacity to deal with the demand for intensive alcohol and drug treatment.
This is despite the fact governments at all levels know that funding such treatment saves the community much more than it costs. Sadly, there are few votes in …
Tony Abbott has achieved plenty in his first year, thanks to some of his key ministers. Ross Fitzgerald rates them.
This year, despite his many critics, and despite the fact that the federal budget is very much a work in progress, Prime Minister Tony Abbott managed to get rid of the carbon tax, stop the boats, keep his parliamentary team relatively stable, and make considerable progress with infrastructure reform and deregulation.
This was achieved with the aid of some key ministers and of one parliamentary secretary in particular.
The strongest ministerial performer is …
AS an alcoholic teenager living in the petit-bourgeois Melbourne suburb of East Brighton, my idea of a good Saturday night was to go on my own, armed with a flagon of claret, to the Brighton Cemetery.
There I would sit in front of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s obelisk reading his best-known verse: “Life is only froth and bubble / Two things stand like stone / Kindness in another’s trouble / Courage in your own.
These days I find it revealing that, of all the people buried in the cemetery, I wasn’t attracted to …
WHEN the nonfiction prize at the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards was awarded to two books, Kevin Rudd “went apeshit, to quote someone who was a judge at the time, and ordered there never again be joint winners. If we needed further evidence that we’re not in Rudd-land any more it came at the 2014 awards this week, the first under a Liberal prime minister, when three of six prizes were split.
Tony Abbott, who was in good spirits at Monday night’s awards dinner at the National Gallery of Victoria, made …
Australia’s Group of Eight (Go8) universities are all in capital cities. Victoria and NSW each have two Go8 universities, while the other states and territories, except for Tasmania and the Northern Territory, each have only one. Tasmania and the NT have none.
The richest pickings for universities are in the large capital cities where most Australians live. This will be even more the case following fee deregulation. Several regional and smaller universities have sought to cash in on the big city market with mini-campuses. Central Queensland University, for example, has mini-campuses …
VICTORIANS go to the polls next Saturday to elect a new government and the bookies have Labor as odds on favourites to win. However an even shorter-priced bet is that neither the Coalition nor Labor will have control of the Victorian upper house. This may well reside with a small party and possibly a religious one.
Saturday could be one of the most crucial upper house state elections that Australia has seen for many years. This is because it comes at a time when a clutch of progressive social issues are …
In the US mid term elections on November 4, voters in Oregon, Alaska and Washington DC, like voters in Colorado and Washington states back in 2012, passed ballot initiatives to start taxing and regulating recreational cannabis. Also in the 2014 elections, voters in California supported a very important ballot initiative to reduce the severity of penalties for drug offences. This initiative is expected to substantially reduce the very high incarceration rate in the most populous state of the union. It is now clear that voters in the US are growing …
Review of ‘Peacemongers’
By Barry Hill
UQP, 676pp, $45 (HB)
BARRY Hill and I share at least one thing in common: an abiding admiration for Indian poet, novelist, ÂÂphilosopher and playwright Rabindranath Tagore. Born in 1861 in Calcutta (now Kolkata, West Bengal), Tagore died in 1941, a few months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
A friend of Albert Einstein, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, Tagore was one of the world’s great public intellectuals, an early leader of India’s nationalist movement and, in 1913, the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. …
Retired Supreme Court judge and former corruption inquiry head Tony Fitzgerald has described former Queensland premier Wayne Goss as a man of “uncompromising integrity”.
Mr Goss implemented the reforms Mr Fitzgerald recommended in his 1989 landmark report into Queensland police corruption.
The report’s findings of entrenched corruptions led to an election which swept away of 32 years of conservative Queensland government.
“Wayne Goss was a man of uncompromising integrity and an outstanding Queenslander whom I greatly admired,” Mr Fitzgerald said.
“We first met when I held a few meetings with him and the other …
“RUSSIANS are shits. They always have been shits. They always will be shits. If you understand that, boys, you can understand foreign policy!
This is what our biology teacher, Norton Hobson, a strongly anti-communist ex-communist, said to us at Melbourne High School in 1960.
Although somewhat of a caricature, Mr Hobson’s pithy statement contains at least an element of truth, which Tony Abbott might keep in mind when he meets President Vladimir Putin at next Saturday’s G20 leaders summit in Brisbane.
Because the G20 is a consensus-based forum, any decision to ban the …
