Journal
Articles
On the abolition of Question Time
IN 2014, EIGHTEEN years after Paul Keating lost the prime ministership, a collection of his prize insults appeared in...
Beyond the nadir of political leadership
SHORTLY AFTER SEIZING the prime ministership in September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull told reporters covering their third leadership coup against...
The memory ladder
THERE APPEARS TO be a deep attraction to the naive idea that we can re-create ourselves and our societies...
Need, greed or deeds
AT THE BEGINNING of the First World War, a fifty-something German academic, vigorous but not fit enough for the...
The good old days
Over the last thirty years I have sought to explore how our top political executives exercised their power, whether they were prime ministers, ministers or departmental secretaries. My books include a study of the ways that the Australian Cabinets have changed over the past hundred and fifteen years, and two books on particular prime ministers, one from each side of the political divide. My interest has always been on how they do the job, how they define their responsibilities, what being prime minister means. Perhaps inevitably, when current circumstances are compared to, and placed in the context of, past leaders, it is the continuities rather than the differences that strike me as the most significant.
Avoiding the simplicity trap
AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC POLICY labours under the weight of illustrious ancestors. There was, in this country, a period that has...
Listening but not hearing
ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS – ONCE the subject of Australian innovation in policy and law reform attended to by the routine...
The limits of ‘new power’
IN THE PAST decade, using the internet to harness people’s passion and direct it in support of issues and...
Bad news, inconvenient truths
IF NEWSPAPERS WERE reporting about anything else, the headlines would be telling of the apocalypse to come. But journalists...
Ruling, not governing
RULING IS A consequence of professional politicking. Yet it has also created unmatched instability in modern Australian politics. Professionalisation...
On institutions
I LOVE INSTITUTIONS. It is not a very fashionable thing to admit, I know. In our age of individual freedoms,...
Capital O organising
THE UNION ORGANISING brand seems set to get a major makeover with news that Hollywood star James Franco is...
