Dr H. V. Evatt, who led the federal Australian Labor Party from 1951 to 1960, had  been a high-profile world figure during World War II and had served a term as an early president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Doc Evatt, notoriously, was a disastrous leader , the great Labor split of the 1950s occurred on his watch , but what is less known is that his political career was in difficulties even before he became leader. These difficulties arose from his failure to reconcile the competing demands of global diplomacy …

JUST before his ministerial responsibilities were significantly reduced, Peter Garrett made one of Australia’s great political understatements.
The former Midnight Oil frontman said of Labor’s insulation program: “We’re seeing a relatively small number of complaints in the system, given the scale of the system, about 0.5 per cent of complaints given the totality of the system. It has been a very successful program . . .” Two weeks later he was demoted and the program was cancelled.
As Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne pointed out last week, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd …

NEW environmental laws are undermining indigenous and non-indigenous property rights.
The protection of property rights in Australia is an important issue that is uniting indigenous and non-indigenous landholders.
Both are concerned that in recent years the introduction of vegetation clearing laws, compulsory property acquisitions and, recently, the Wild Rivers legislation in Queensland threaten their livelihoods. So they are seeking recognition and protection of their rights where they have been removed by environmental and heritage laws, and just compensation if these rights are removed.
One unlikely champion to take a stand on this issue …

WHEN he was 14 and dressed in his school uniform, Ross Fitzgerald stood in the public bar of a Melbourne pub and at 11am ordered a brandy, lime and soda. The barman suggested he take off his hat. And so began the alcoholic life of an eminent Australian academic who, until he joined AA, spent every Christmas Day in a mental hospital between the ages of 16 and 25.
“I was so enclosed and enmeshed in myself”, he writes, “that I virtually didn’t see anything outside”.
Sober for 40 years, Dr Fitzgerald …

KEVIN Rudd’s threat to force “co-operative federalism” on to the states on the issue of health sees him reading the electorate very well.
The PM is keenly aware of how long a memory can last when you’ve been forced to wait for five hours in casualty with a sprained ankle, or how deeply personal the political becomes when you’re forced to endure the grinding pain of a worn-out hip for 12 months before you can get a replacement.
If he hasn’t fiscally hammered the states into an agreement, Rudd may well get …

“The truth is that, quite often, a little bit of me goes a long way, Ross Fitzgerald writes towards the end of My Name is Ross. It is a characteristically disarming observation. Fortunately he stopped drinking forty years ago. But this account of his years of drinking and pill-popping nonetheless fills a substantial volume. And a harrowing account it is. But, again characteristically, it is relieved with wit and verve.
The temptation, and Fitzgerald is clearly not one readily to refuse temptation, must have been to present this as a …

Ross Fitzgerald is today a prolific writer; a distinguished historian and a well-known public figure. He is also an alcoholic.
At the age of 25 he was a broken man who, in a few short years, had gone from being an honours graduate from Sydney University to a man who, after many admissions to mental hospitals, living on what few wits remained to him, and having exhausted the patience of his many friends, had reached the nadir of his life with death closing fast upon him.
Last year he celebrated …

ROSS Fitzgerald hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since November 1969. But alcohol has been the defining influence on his life. He began drinking as a 14-year-old (the barman suggested he take off his school hat when he asked for a brandy, lime and soda) and spent much of the next decade drunk.
Fitzgerald says he drank to pretend he wasn’t afraid and because of a difficult relationship with his mother and his genetic predisposition to addiction.
In person, he seems to inspire active like or dislike; in words, he …

CAN someone who hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol for 40 years still be considered an alcoholic? Ross Fitzgerald certainly thinks so, and his searingly honest memoir does an excellent job of explaining that rather odd-sounding perspective.
It must have taken a lot of guts for a well-known political commentator and academic like Fitzgerald to write such a brutal account of his struggle with alcohol.
The first chapters of the book, dealing with a decade-long bender that he began at the age of 14 , are the toughest to read – not …

DESPITE ructions within the NSW Liberal Party and the utter blandness of opposition leader Barry O’Farrell, state Labor, led by the inexperienced and easily influenced Kristina Keneally, is on the nose with most voters.
It beggars belief that in the coming national election the chronic state of Labor in NSW will not translate into a gain for the Coalition of some federal seats, possibly Robertson, Eden-Monaro, Dobell and Bennelong.
Given the federal election will be held well before the NSW election, there is every possibility that voters will punish federal Labor for …

THE adventures of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel ‘Around The World In Eighty Days’, remind us of the epic journey that lies ahead for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. Fogg accepted a wager that required him to circumnavigate the globe, by whatever transport means then available, in a seemingly impossible 80 days.
Fogg and his valet, Passepartout, set off from London on an improbable adventure overcoming all manner of obstacles to arrive back home with just minutes to spare to collect on the bet.
As Abbott and Julie Bishop notch up …