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 …

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, …