Politics

For the past few years, teaching at the Australian National University, I have asked first year politics students whether they would personally consider joining a political party. The question usually produces a few enthusiastic Labor activists, one or two Greens members, and the odd brave Young Liberal. Once, a student flirted with the Sex Party. But the overwhelmi ...

‘The obscurest epoch is today.’

Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1892)

A book that attempts to predict the course of contemporary affairs is always a dangerous enterprise. Events, political events, in particular, have a way of turning like the proverbial worm. Brexit and the election of President Trump are simply the lat ...

The Movement was a secret organisation which radically reduced the power of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) within the union movement during the 1940s and 1950s. Initiated by B.A. Santamaria, the Movement was very active in several Australian states and worked with the general knowledge and approval of key Catholic Church bishops. The Movement (or the Show) u ...

There has been an argument going on in the Liberal Party about the nature of the Menzies heritage – was Robert Menzies, the founder of the modern party, a liberal or a conservative? Notably absent from this discussion has been the national figure who was the first leader of a united anti-Labor party and who also happens to have been a father of Federation, Alfred ...

I was a student at Sydney University when, in 1954, the embattled Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt went public, accusing a small group of Labor MPs of disloyalty, their attempt to gain control of the party being directed from a source outside the labour movement. He identified the Melbourne News Weekly as their mouthpiece. Few had heard of B.A. (‘Bob’) Santam ...

David Marr’s Quarterly Essay, The White Queen: One Nation and the politics of race (2017) is a comprehensive and scholarly look at Pauline Hanson’s appeal, and what her revival, tepid as it may be in an international context, says about the way race has been exploited in the bread and circuses of politics. John Safran is equally interested in race, and ...