AFTER THE LABOR GOVERNMENT, the organisation facing the biggest test in the Queensland election was the new conservative hybrid, the Liberal National Party. It had polled well in the lead-up to the election, but in reality the swing it needed - in the vicinity of 8 per cent - was always on the outer margins...

AT FIRST, after my plane touched down in Far North Queensland, I couldn’t see much evidence of either financial or climatic turbulence. Towering banks of purple-grey cloud clung to the forested slopes that surround Cairns, but there wasn’t even a tail wind from cyclone Hamish, which was whipping up ferocious seas to the south. My...

KEVIN RUDD hates poker machines. At least that’s what he told the Australianas he pitched for votes before the federal election. But since he became prime minister Mr Rudd’s passion seems to have cooled. He hasn't initiated any legislation or implemented any policy that would help him keep his pre-election promise to “wean" state treasuries...

IT IS OFTEN SAID that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. But it seems that in the case of Minister Wong’s version of emissions trading, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, or CPRS, there is nothing less powerful than an idea whose time never actually came. The flaws in the...

JUST OVER a century ago Australia’s two non-Labor political parties - Alfred Deakin’s Liberals and George Reid’s Anti-Socialists - merged to form the Fusion Party. The new party was dominated by economic conservatives and suffered a heavy electoral defeat at the hands of the young Labor Party the following year. Nearly one hundred years later...