Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Norman Abjorensen

How many of us would really want to be prime minister? The road to The Lodge is littered with depressing tales of ambitious politicians abandoning their friends, principles, and even their own authentic voice in order to secure the Top Job. Then, once you’ve fulfilled your life’s ambitions, voters and your own supporters are liable to tire of you and seek a new political hero. Nevertheless, prime ministers become accustomed to the power, public attention, and perks of office; they find it difficult to choose the ‘right time’ to leave office.

... (read more)

Dear Editor,

This is a note to congratulate you on the quality of the latest Calibre Prize essays, by Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy, in the April edition of ABR. The two pieces maintain the incredibly high standards of the Prize, of which I was honoured to be an inaugural judge.

... (read more)

DIAMETRIC OPPOSITES

Dear Editor,

I concur with Daniel Thomas’s high opinion of the collection of Eva and Marc Besen and of their TarraWarra Museum, and share his admiration of the essays by Christopher Heathcote and Sarah Thomas in his review of Encounters with Australian Modern Art (February 2009).

...

Australian conservatism, for all its political dominance, is little understood and has been studied by surprisingly few scholars. The very industrious and perceptive Peter van Onselen is almost single-handedly determined to correct this imbalance. He has brought together a timely collection of essays on the Liberal Party and its future, coinciding with yet another term in unaccustomed opposition, an experience invariably chastising for the conservatives. The immediate predecessors to the modern-day Liberal Party on the non-Labor side of politics disintegrated on losing office, and the Liberal Party’s own spells in opposition have been periods of both blood-letting and soul searching. There is a happy focus (for the Liberal Party, at least) on the latter in this necessarily mixed bag.

... (read more)

Howard’s Fourth Government by Chris Aulich and Roger Wettenhall (eds) & Inside Kevin 07 by Christine Jackman

by
September 2008, no. 304

The Australian ritual of a federal election campaign every two or three years is one in which voters are invited to participate in hyperbole. Reality is magnified a thousand times as the actors perform a finely choreographed political quadrille while their every word and gesture are scrutinised for meaning and analysed for nuance. Yet for all the expensive and lavish hoopla that now constitutes an election campaign, Australians are a reluctant people when it comes to getting rid of governments, however short they fall in expectations. On only eleven occasions in the 107 years of federation have they opted for change.

... (read more)

Henry Bolte and Bob Askin were the ‘big men’ of state politics in the 1960s, when I was a young political scientist. Bolte I never met, and Askin I met only once, but I knew the latter’s deputy premier, Charlie Cutler, quite well. I grew up in northern New South Wales and throughout my life, it seemed, we had only ever had Labor governments. The premiers cycled by with an air of inevitable succession: McKell, McGirr, Cahill, Heffron, Renshaw. Yet all five had been there in 1941 when the rejuvenated Labor Party, free both of Jack Lang and the far-left opposition to him, trounced the Mair–Bruxner government at the polls. For anyone who had been through that quarter of a century, Labor’s narrow defeat in 1965 was a shock. How could it have happened?

... (read more)

It is little appreciated just how much power and influence are wielded by a successful Liberal prime minister, success being measured entirely by electoral victory. Whereas a Labor prime minister has a caucus, factions, the ACTU, a not always co-operative national executive and a sometimes fractious national conference to exert countervailing influence, a conservative leader is remarkably unfettered. The party, and indeed the government, becomes an extension of him, a mere appendage.

... (read more)