The budget’s shortcomings don’t end with the fairness problem... It has failed to win support from the voters, and failed to win support from the Senate. Why? I think there are two reasons. The first is that its measures, taken together, fail the test of fairness. That’s well known, and the opinion polls show the...

Labor’s campaigning in Victoria had a lineage stretching back to community activist Saul Alinsky via Barack Obama AS THE VICTORIAN Liberals begin the dispiriting task of working out why they lost last month’s winnable election campaign, they could do worse than to ferret out a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Alinsky, a radical...

The polls are showing how far the Coalition has drifted from the mainstream, and the electoral damage could easily outlive this government IN A FEW days’ time, a full year will have passed since the federal Coalition was ahead of Labor in the opinion polls. Individual surveys have put Tony Abbott’s government in the lead...

As the dust settles after the US–China climate announcement and Australia’s G20 climate debacle, a closer look at the Abbott government’s approach to international cooperation on climate change and economic prosperity AUSTRALIA was once widely regarded as a nation that “punched above its weight” in international affairs. It’s a cliché, and not necessarily a helpful...

In the long run, the enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend. It’s a mistake that’s proving costly for the Liberals TWENTY years ago, during a long, leisurely lunch conversation about the Liberals and their history, John Howard expressed the view to me that the party no longer attracted the sort of people it...