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The Scotts live in an affluent electorate where the longer-established residents have consistently manifested Liberal tendencies, occasionally tinged with green because of the presence of a university. A recent redistribution has expanded its boundaries, adding middle-class voters less enamoured of conservatives and suddenly our long-serving Liberal incumbent is looking decidedly shaky. (more…)

Most Australians have little trust in our parliament and in our members of parliament. Parliament has not responded to changes in community attitudes and aspirations. With the end of the two-party dominance it is inevitable that the parliament will be permanently in gridlock with no government controlling the Senate.

We need an independent enquiry to consider parliamentary reform and ways to breath life again into our democratic institutions. That reform would be good politics as well as good policy for the leader who would recognize the problem, listen and embrace the need for change.   (more…)

Let’s cut to the chase: whatever the optimists in the ALP may imagine, there is almost no chance of Kristina Keneally beating John Alexander in the Bennelong by-election. (more…)

A contention that New Zealand has “lapped” Australia is worth examining in the light of recent developments.  The vote to support sex marriage means Australia has increased its pace, but has it caught up? (more…)

Trumps attack on the media and truth are disturbing, says Joseph Stiglitz (the Guardian)

Paul Keating warns that, without imagination, the economy is lost. (Mark Kenny – the Canberra Times)

Writing in the Canberra Times last weekend, Crispin Hull reminds us of the history of upheaveals – from the French Revolution to the recent support for far-right populists – when “the wealthy elites fail to pay a reasonable share of taxes so that the broad mass of society gets decent education, health and housing.”.  Capitalism must be saved from its own self-destructive forces.

Qld Labor ups the ante on renewables, with more ambition and new technology, writes Giles Parkinson in RenewEconomy

The citizenship crisis has shown Turnbull in his usual, dreadful form, says Jack Waterford in the Canberra Times.

Last Saturday, 11 November, we published on Pearls and Irritations Douglas Newton’s contribution “Armistice Day – narrow nationalist naiveties and voodoo vindications of war”. On the same day, on Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra, writer and broadcaster Jeff Sparrow recounted the sordid reality of the Dardanelles campaign: it wasn’t about securing freedom or any other noble goal. Rather its goal was to hand over that territory to Czarist Russia, at that time the “most oppressive regime in the entire world”.

Also, lest we forget, 11 November was the anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. Christopher Pollard outlines “five facts” about the dismissal. He reveals extraordinary breaches of the Australian Constitution and of parliamentary conventions by those determined to destroy the Whitlam Government.

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books writes on the “bomb power” of the US presidents

Ross Gittins explains that something has gone badly wrong with teaching.

Catherine Pepinster in her new book, The Keys and the Kingdom reveals that a British diplomat hosted a party of cardinals from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to support the Bishop of Buenos Aires who would later become Pope. Cardinal Pell was not invited. She is interviewed on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report

Jim Molan is in line to take a NSW Senate vacancy.  He was very active in the Abbott government’s asylum turn-back policy. In 2004 he supervised The Coalition attack on Fallujah in Iraq. See link to earlier post of John Menadue

Tamie Fraser tweets a challenge to Peter Dutton over Manus Island

Will someone please provide Malcolm Turnbull with a fiddle; something to occupy our leader while his party and possibly his government burn. (more…)

If Week 2 of the Queensland election campaign was dominated by parochialism and regional development, Week 3 was about statewide preference deals and the price to be paid by the LNP as it seeks to bolster its sagging fortunes by agreeing to a list of One Nation demands. In addition, one or two of the chaotic events on the national stage caught the attention of locals, after Canberra being invisible earlier in the campaign. These also related to the LNP’s new-found friends. (more…)

National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory. It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current contenders for our national history, I think we should pick ‘Advance Australia Fair’ as the only truly useful one. (more…)

So Malcolm Turnbull’s big idea to end the dual citizen crisis is to ask (or perhaps tell – it is not clear which) his troops, and presumably the rest of the parliament, to explain openly and concisely whether they believe they are compliant with the constitution or not. (more…)

Simon Birmingham and other exasperated colleagues are quite right: it is bizarre and dishonest in the extreme for those who have spent the last months – years even –  implacably opposing same sex marriage to now demand the right to determine how it is to be implemented, assuming the interminable plebiscite get a majority this week. (more…)