The crisis of public confidence in politics is not limited to Australia, but public disengagement, retail politics and lack of vision are crippling our ability to tackle long-term and wicked problems.
- Professorial Fellow, The University of Melbourne
Malcolm Fraser used to argue that he had not changed his political position, but he had in significant ways. This personal evolution was a wonderful quality in the former prime minister.
The plight of Andrew Chan and Myuan Sukumaran in Indonesia illustrates how the death penalty is always highly politicised.
Our nation’s future depends on the quality of its thinking and its leaders. As such, science must be at the core of our national discourse.
In the wake of the ALP’s poor result in the recent Western Australia Senate election, The Conversation is publishing a series of articles looking at the party’s brand, organisation and future prospects…
We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, in which the major influences have been secularism, materialism, utilitarianism, urbanisation, remoteness from nature, institutional failure (especially in…
I have been around for a long time and involved in some terrible campaigns, but the policy vacuum in 2013 was the worst I can recall. There was no serious debate on issues, whether simple or complex, and…
As somebody with a lifelong, but not very happy, involvement in politics, I must declare an interest, as a life member of the ALP. Nevertheless, I think I can be objective in describing the decay of our…
We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing the mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play. Each time…
Queensland has developed a tradition of political swings that are far greater than the national average. Labor held only one Queensland House of Representatives seat in 1975 and in 1996 only two. The major…
I can claim to be the oldest surviving inhabitant of the climate change controversy. I gave my first major speech (at least, I thought it was major) about the human contribution to climate change, especially…
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