GM Holden’s announcement that it will pull out of car manufacturing in Australia has led Toyota to question whether it can survive as a sole car maker in the country and prompted Labor and the union movement…
- Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
ABC chairman Jim Spigelman has strongly defended the national broadcaster against political attacks and complaints about its competing online with commercial media. Spigelman said there was nothing new…
While most in the big end of town are relieved at the Abbott government’s arrival, Holden is getting more than the cold shoulder. The Coalition is aggressively taking on the car maker that has its hand…
The government has taken the first step in exploring how to curb the scope for “micro” parties to win Senate places through elaborate preference deals. Special Minister of State Michael Ronaldson has asked…
A factional fix over Victorian legislation council preselections has blown up, with the returning officer refusing to declare the ballot because the result did not meet the ALP’s affirmative action provision…
Members of the ALP national executive will vote tomorrow to preselect candidates for Victorian legislative council electorates. Executive members from as far away as Western Australia and Queensland will…
Prime Minister Tony Abbott tonight has made a fresh but futile plea to the Senate to repeal the carbon and mining taxes this week, ahead of departing to attend Tuesday’s memorial service for Nelson Mandela…
The Abbott government is, as a new administration, being tested out on various fronts. A very obvious one is industry policy and whether it is going to hold firm against providing more subsidies. Both…
Prime minister Tony Abbott has declared Holden will receive no new injection of taxpayer funds and called on the company to declare its intentions, amid reports it is planning to pull out of Australia…
A column by Paul Kelly in The Australian this week caused a ripple around the government. It said, in essence, that Education Minister Chris Pyne had been told, after a discussion in the expenditure review…
Queensland Liberal senator Ian Macdonald is not prominent and he has an axe to grind. Shadow parliamentary secretary for northern Australia, he didn’t even make the “third eleven” of the frontbench in…
The government today clinched a deal with the Greens to scrap the debt ceiling, in exchange for undertaking to provide detailed information and schedule regular parliamentary debates on the subject. The…
The ABC and its managing director Mark Scott are caught in a perfect storm. Critics variously driven by ideology, commercial interests or a combination have found in the ABC’s decision to partner with…
Labor has now done a backflip on education – declaring it will combine with the Greens to block the $2.3 billion savings from higher education that it announced. The cuts were designed by the Gillard government…
It was the messiest back down imaginable but Tony Abbott knew he had no choice. The row over school funding had turned into a hurricane blowing away his credibility on the key question of trust. So Abbott…
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has done a backflip on his earlier Gonski backflip - restoring all the money he originally promised for schools funding, with a guarantee that no school will be worse off. After…
Tony Abbott enters the last parliamentary fortnight highly vulnerable on that familiar issue of “trust” – and it is all his own doing. The Prime Minister today added to the ammunition the opposition has…
The Abbott government is sailing in heavy waters, in a boat that is less than entirely shipshape. It’s fighting with the states over schools funding, with Indonesia over spying, with China over that country’s…
Treasurer Joe Hockey has rejected the US company Archer Daniels Midland’s A$3.4 billion bid for the Australian agri-giant GrainCorp, giving the Nationals their first big victory in the Abbott government…
David Gonski and members of his panel on school funding, who included Kathryn Greiner and Carmen Lawrence, have every reason to feel appalled at the way their work has been treated and trashed by both…
Western Australian Liberal premier Colin Barnett has signalled that a major blowout in the estimated cost of the national disability scheme will be a main issue for Tony Abbott’s first Council of Australian…
The Curtin Family Home Lecture for the National Trust of Australia (WA), delivered on November 25, 2013. In recent years, we’ve become increasingly conscious of the need to preserve and make accessible…
WORK UNTIL YOU DROP screamed Sydney’s Daily Telegraph headline. The story related to the Productivity Commission canvassing the desirability of lifting the pension age – already slowly heading for 67…
The most extraordinary intervention in a disastrous week for Australian-Indonesian relations came out of the blue. Who could have anticipated the provocative tweeting by Liberal party pollster Mark Textor…
Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has dramatically escalated the crisis with Australia by suspending joint patrols to combat people smuggling and other military co-operation and intelligence…
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