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Mark Kenny

Mark Kenny

Mark Kenny is a professor at the Australian Studies Institute at ANU. He was for many years a senior political journalist in the Parliament House Press Gallery, where he was chief political correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He hosts the popular politics podcast Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny and is a columnist for The Canberra Times. 

Mark Kenny on Labor's challenges to the Opposition

June 2023, no. 454 23 May 2023
In 2008, at the Australian zenith of the American custom of rating the first hundred days in power, Kevin Rudd issued a fifty-five-page booklet to mark his new government’s quotidian ton. Inevitably, it proved nothing much at all. Critics said it was both premature and simply validated the critique that Labor under Rudd had ‘hit the ground reviewing’. The Sydney Morning Herald worked out tha ... (read more)

Mark Kenny reviews 'Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise' by Niki Savva

January-February 2023, no. 450 26 December 2022
Luck has always been a potent force in politics, good and bad, but for Scott Morrison, Australia’s thirtieth prime minister, it almost single-handedly drove his unheralded ascent. Luck, specifically his, explains how voters acquired a new prime minister in 2018 without an election – one whose personal ambition overshadowed any record of achievement or demonstrable expertise. The joke in Canbe ... (read more)

'The power of office' by Mark Kenny

August 2022, no. 445 26 July 2022
Before the May 2022 federal election, Anthony Albanese, partly to silence critics of his ‘small target’ campaign and partly to manage wider expectations, proposed to lead a Labor government that under-promised and over-delivered. A deliberately thin ‘look-at-them’ election campaign was designed to keep the focus on a tired and compromised Coalition government, rather than following Labor ... (read more)