The decline in support for the Voice after initial strong polling demonstrates settlers are resistant to the idea of Indigenous peoples as a collective subject entitled to a unified Voice.
- Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University
Clive Hamilton’s memoir of 40 years in activism is most of all a narrative of ideas in action. He argues for the power of provocation – and against the left, the right and China.
Branch stacking may not be be new. But if the ALP is to fend off political rivals in the future, it will need to get serious about reform.
Labor’s defeat revives a familiar problem in Australian political history: the left’s inability to show how its policies can improve people’s material conditions.
Turnbull brought a Menzian style to his leadership, but the world has changed quite a bit since Robert Menzies.
Labor has managed more cohesion in recent years because its left and right wings have shifted to common ground - partly through its factions.
Despite attempts to import its ideas, evangelical Christianity has never held the same political appeal in Australia as it does in the United States.
Christianity plays a relatively minor role in Australian politics. Instead, it takes the guise of a general cultural conservatism, as demonstrated by the same-sex marriage and school funding debates.
Not only is the Australian Christian Lobby losing relevance, it has had to appeal to Bill Shorten to pay attention to the group in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
The decline in Malcolm Turnbull’s popularity and the increasingly explicit critiques of his leadership have raised the question of whether the Liberal Party has a unifying ideology.
Tony Abbott’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture, delivered in London on Tuesday night, provides a fitting epitaph to his government.
Faction Man is a product of Black Inc. From their perspective, Bill Shorten – and his fascination with grimy Labor machine politics – is an alien figure.
Will Tony Abbott’s conservatism survive the tide of history?
The career of late former Victorian premier Joan Kirner illustrated the story of the Australian Left from the Whitlam era to the present day.
The defeat of the Abbott government’s higher education reform package in the Senate adds another line to its long list of policy failures.
After the defeat of the Abbott government’s higher education bills in the Senate, Education Minister Christopher Pyne invoked the legacy of past “reforms” that had been violently contested at the time…
The popular response to Gough Whitlam’s death tells us more about the politics of the present than the past. Whitlam has been cast as a messiah; as Labor’s saviour; and as the slayer of what Paul Keating…
Since coming to office, the Abbott government has initiated a wide range of reviews into policy areas such as the national school curriculum and the Renewable Energy Target. Some commentators have argued…
It would be a fair observation that the Abbott government hopes that the result of the two royal commissions it has established since taking office will be damaging to the Labor Party. The royal commissions…
Seven Speakers of the British House of Commons were executed by beheading between 1394 and 1535. While Bronwyn Bishop, the current Speaker of Australia’s House of Representatives, is unlikely to face this…
The Conversation is running a series, Class in Australia, to identify, illuminate and debate its many manifestations. Here, Geoffrey Robinson traces the history of Australian political debate on class…
Sometimes in politics Newton’s Third Law – for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction – is applicable. Australia has a long history of public ownership, but it also has a long history of…
Should we care about Kevin Rudd’s legacy? Will anyone care? Australian political historians gaze with envy at the United States, where past presidents are revered and books about the “founding fathers…
It is a sign of Labor’s crisis that Mark Latham, the party’s former parliamentary leader, has been re-admitted to polite centre-Left company. For his book Not Dead Yet: What Future for Labor?, Latham has…
Former prime minister Julia Gillard has returned to the spotlight after maintaining a dignified silence since her removal as Labor leader in June. Since the defeat of the federal Labor government, she…
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