THE Coalition’s strategists were on high alert in the second half of last year as Julia Gillard made a flurry of policy announcements that could have been used as a platform for an early election.
The announcements – on health, disability and education – contained no details and there was no funding allocation but they had electoral appeal.
It now appears that this activity was part of the Prime Minister’s scheme to protect her leadership from a resurgent Kevin Rudd and to calm the frayed nerves of her Labor backbench. There is …

Recently Julia Gillard mused that she wanted to be able to say in years to come that she did things “that twenty, thirty years later are making a difference to Australia for the better.”
She does not have the luxury of time.
Even after her relatively short term as prime minister, her political legacy is set in stone.

Given that the full fallout from her disastrous term as Prime Minister will not be felt for many years, her legacy is already one of wasted opportunities, flawed judgment, poor policy implementation and ugly …

FIFTY years ago, journalist Alan Reid arranged for photographs to be taken of Labor’s then federal leader, Arthur Calwell, and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, waiting outside under a street light as ALP powerbrokers met in a Canberra hotel to determine a key item of ALP policy.
There could be no clearer evidence of their subservience to the party machine. Five damaging photographs appeared in Sydney’s ‘The Daily Telegraph’ on Friday, March 22, 1963.

In the wake of the December 1961 election, which Calwell lost by one seat, Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies …

NEXT year marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of Australia’s best-selling single ever, ‘Australiana’.
Performed by Sandy Gutman (aka Austen Tayshus), this subversive spoken-word piece is filled with an array of Australian puns, including ‘How much can a Koala bear?’, ‘Do you want to go Anna?’ and ‘Tryin’ to Platypus!’
Born in New York on March 17, 1954, Austen Tayshus – a combination of “ostentatious” and “Austin, Texas” – first gained widespread public recognition when Australiana was released. Indeed this comic masterpiece is still in huge demand whenever and wherever Australia’s …

HOW lucky am I that I was born at a time when Alcoholics Anonymous was well and truly functioning in Australia.
AA began in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, when alcoholic New York stockbroker Bill Wilson, fearful that he would resume drinking, sought out another alcoholic with whom to talk, namely a doctor, Bob Smith, who previous to their meeting could not stop drinking.
Soon the loosely knit fellowship of AA spread to Cleveland (where in the late 1960s I was hospitalised many times for alcoholism) and then throughout the US.

Australia was the …

The recent announcement of a royal commission on child sex abuse caught many people by surprise. Although the weight of allegations and prosecutions, especially against Australia’s clergy, had been rising alarmingly, until recently the issue of child sex abuse was still being ignored at a policy level by all of Australia’s political parties, except one.
When Fiona Patten launched the Australian Sex Party in 2009, she was the only political leader calling for a royal commission into child sex abuse. In 2000 (the same year that the Irish government announced …

TODAY it is timely to recall that, on December 1, 1899, Anderson Dawson led the world’s first Labor government into office in Queensland.
Dawson, member of the Legislative Assembly for Charters Towers, fleetingly ran the colony of Queensland. His minority government lasted only a week, but it gave the Labor Party an opportunity to get the dirt on the conservatives by examining previous governments’ files.
It also paved the way for future ALP governments in Queensland and throughout Australia. Then, as now, politics was a tough and dirty game.
Dawson was born in …

DISCUSSION of death and dying is still something of a taboo in our society.
But, as Australia’s best-known voluntary euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke argues, patients who are seriously ill deserve to have a choice about how to exit this world. That is perhaps why this medico has spent years developing peaceful and reliable methods designed to give dignity and choice to those whose physical suffering has become too much to bear.

What the good doctor never banked on is the reaction of the Australian Health Professionals Regulatory Authority. In August, AHPRA launched …

JULIA Gillard has been rightly criticised for her poor judgment.
There are too many examples to list, but they include her farcical announcement of an East Timor processing centre for asylum-seekers; her citizens’ assembly that sank without trace; her panicked decision to suspend live-cattle exports to Indonesia; her introduction of the carbon tax that she promised would not be introduced; her lax oversight of the heavily rorted school building program; and her support for disgraced MPs Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson.

Even though I initially thought it a good idea, another poor …

FOR better or for worse, the Labor Party seems now locked in behind Julia Gillard to take it to the next election.
Kevin Rudd still harbours unfinished business and may yet challenge again, but his recent thrusts and parries to regain relevance on the political stage appear to have amounted to nothing. There are still too many enemies within.
Discounting some opportunistic race to the polls early next year, Australia must set a date for a federal election sometime in the second half of the year. The Prime Minister could go as …

It’s an abuse to use a body set up to investigate serious crime to probe a public service leak, Ross Fitzgerald writes.
During the Bjelke-Petersen era, Tony Fitzgerald, QC, saved Queensland from years of National Party corruption. Fitzgerald’s courage and personal sacrifice was an inspiration to a generation of Queenslanders who wanted honesty in public administration. He changed Queensland for the better.
The recommendations of Fitzgerald’s landmark report shook up the state, and rightly so. One of his key recommendations was the establishment of a corruption-fighting body now called the Crime and …