When another Newspoll dropped this week (51–49 in the Coalition’s favour, again) the Australian mentioned a change in how its pollsters will be estimating two-party-preferred figures between now and the federal election. No longer will they simply slot in the flows from One Nation recorded at the 2022 election; they’ve
Western Australia’s position as the metronome of Australian electoral politics is set to end in three weeks’ time. Since 1974, Labor and the Coalition have held government for roughly the same number of years; since 1993, they’ve taken turns governing for two four-year terms before returning to the opposition benches.
Despite its record longevity (or perhaps because of it), the Menzies government has never been short of critics, among the most prominent being the late author Donald Horne and former prime minister Paul Keating. Horne famously saw Australia as “a lucky country” (the term being employed ironically) “governed by second-rate
On Monday this week Britain’s Home Office released blurry footage of immigration officials in hi-vis vests escorting men from a bus to a plane. It was accompanied by a statement celebrating the removal of 19,000 people from Britain since the government took office in July. The Home Office shared the
Johanna Ekström was a Swedish poet, fiction writer and visual artist who died at the early age of fifty-one after a melanoma was discovered in her right eye too late to prevent it spreading to her liver. Sigrid Rausing, her best friend since high school and an author herself, was
“There are three rooms here in the Gran Café de Paris, each reserved for specific clientele,” declared Hashim, my bookish, puckish guide to Tangier and its literary past. “Where we are: this is the general place for men to meet.” “Over there,” he said, pointing his sugar sachet behind him.
The critically acclaimed Chinese-language film Black Dog, currently showing in Australian cinemas, tells the story of a man and a dog, a common subject in English-language movies but less so in Chinese. Writer-director Guan Hu attributes his inspiration for the film partly to an interest in the nature of communication
Running through Anne Maxwell and Lucy Van’s new book, Australian Women’s Historical Photography, is the word “freedom,” sometimes deployed by the authors and sometimes by the photographers themselves. For these women, active at some point between the late nineteenth century and the end of the second world war, photography offered
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019: Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on
How popular or unpopular was the Palaszczuk government in early to mid 2022? Was it a drag on federal Labor’s Queensland vote at the 21 May election? And how will premier David Crisafulli and team, in office since late October, be travelling when Queenslanders cast their 2025 federal votes? These
As a historian with a close interest in contemporary policy, John Murphy is well aware of the need to learn carefully from past successes, failures and debates. But few decision-makers or influencers in politics, the media and elsewhere seem to agree, and even relatively recent experiences are ignored or misdescribed
In June last year one of our best-known international affairs analysts, Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute, floated a striking proposal in the journal Australian Foreign Affairs: a formal military alliance with Indonesia that would vastly extend the ambit of the “echidna” defence strategy he has advanced as an alternative
When another Newspoll dropped this week (51–49 in the Coalition’s favour, again) the Australian mentioned a change in how its pollsters will be estimating two-party-preferred figures between now and the federal election. No longer will they simply slot in the flows from One Nation recorded at the 2022 election; they’ve
Western Australia’s position as the metronome of Australian electoral politics is set to end in three weeks’ time. Since 1974, Labor and the Coalition have held government for roughly the same number of years; since 1993, they’ve taken turns governing for two four-year terms before returning to the opposition benches.
Despite its record longevity (or perhaps because of it), the Menzies government has never been short of critics, among the most prominent being the late author Donald Horne and former prime minister Paul Keating. Horne famously saw Australia as “a lucky country” (the term being employed ironically) “governed by second-rate
On Monday this week Britain’s Home Office released blurry footage of immigration officials in hi-vis vests escorting men from a bus to a plane. It was accompanied by a statement celebrating the removal of 19,000 people from Britain since the government took office in July. The Home Office shared the
Johanna Ekström was a Swedish poet, fiction writer and visual artist who died at the early age of fifty-one after a melanoma was discovered in her right eye too late to prevent it spreading to her liver. Sigrid Rausing, her best friend since high school and an author herself, was
“There are three rooms here in the Gran Café de Paris, each reserved for specific clientele,” declared Hashim, my bookish, puckish guide to Tangier and its literary past. “Where we are: this is the general place for men to meet.” “Over there,” he said, pointing his sugar sachet behind him.
The critically acclaimed Chinese-language film Black Dog, currently showing in Australian cinemas, tells the story of a man and a dog, a common subject in English-language movies but less so in Chinese. Writer-director Guan Hu attributes his inspiration for the film partly to an interest in the nature of communication
Running through Anne Maxwell and Lucy Van’s new book, Australian Women’s Historical Photography, is the word “freedom,” sometimes deployed by the authors and sometimes by the photographers themselves. For these women, active at some point between the late nineteenth century and the end of the second world war, photography offered
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019: Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on
How popular or unpopular was the Palaszczuk government in early to mid 2022? Was it a drag on federal Labor’s Queensland vote at the 21 May election? And how will premier David Crisafulli and team, in office since late October, be travelling when Queenslanders cast their 2025 federal votes? These
As a historian with a close interest in contemporary policy, John Murphy is well aware of the need to learn carefully from past successes, failures and debates. But few decision-makers or influencers in politics, the media and elsewhere seem to agree, and even relatively recent experiences are ignored or misdescribed
In June last year one of our best-known international affairs analysts, Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute, floated a striking proposal in the journal Australian Foreign Affairs: a formal military alliance with Indonesia that would vastly extend the ambit of the “echidna” defence strategy he has advanced as an alternative
