The week’s two big political campaigning scandals — Cambridge Analytica’s data-harvesting and Labor’s funding scam in Victoria — highlight the temptations facing parties desperate to win government. For Labor, an Ombudsman’s report on the affair places valuable information in the hands of the Victorian Opposition.

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...

Private secretary, chief of staff, enforcer? A look at the role of the prime minister’s most influential gatekeeper In the wall of prime minister Bob Hawke’s office in the old Parliament House there was a tiny hole, about the size of a thumbnail. It was not a design flaw or a listening device snuck in...

Paralysed leader or bad advice? A new account of the Rudd–Gillard government looks at what it says about the party’s future Troy Bramston’s readable quickie sets out to advise the leadership of the Labor Party on how to avoid the disasters that befell the Rudd and Gillard governments. He summarises the policies of these governments...

How did an unelected campaign consultant come to exercise such influence over Labor’s 2013 campaign, asks Stephen Mills.