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...

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...

Gough Whitlam’s visit to China in 1971 was a turning point in relations between the two countries. But luck played a part in this audacious mission The 1971 visit to China was not an exercise in political opportunism; it was a bold expression of Whitlam’s foreign policy vision, which prioritised regionalism and internationalism over ties...

A Labor think tank has given a timely warning about the seductive appeal of triumphs past Last month in London, Michael Cooney, executive director of the Labor Party’s main think tank, the Chifley Research Centre, called for an end to what he termed “nostalgia for the new.” In a speech called “ In the Shadow...