KEVIN RUDD ended his first year in office much like John Howard ended his first twelve months in March 1997: still shiny, fresh and popular. It’s not that these new leaders have a special empathy with middle Australia or never put a foot wrong. It’s just that when a mistake is made it is ignored...

THEIR LORDSHIPS and Honourable Members were pleased last week to host the Queen at the Palace of Westminster, where she dutifully delivered the Speech from the Throne to open the new session of parliament. Many of them were decidedly less pleased a week earlier to learn that members of the Metropolitan Police had also paid...

IN his short career in the Senate, Luigi Pallaro achieved the impossible: he brought together Italy’s ideologically irreconcilable political parties. When it came to expressing its contempt for the new senator, the Roman establishment set aside deep differences and spoke with one voice: the guy was a post-ideological buffoon, a throwback to a peasant past...

Although Labor’s SuperClinics make policy sense, resistance from doctors has slowed their implementation, writes JENNIFER DOGGETT on our partner website, Inside Story.

All sides of politics agree that a German-style national feed-in tariff to encourage rooftop solar power makes sense. But Christine Milne’s bill to create the tariff is going nowhere. PETER MARES explains why on our partner website, Inside Story.