• Recent Posts

  • Review: Mark Latham’s Not Dead Yet
  • Preparing for war
  • No solution without revolution – an update
  • The phoney problem of policy
  • The phoney problem of ideology

• From the archives

  Sooner or later this bankruptcy must work its way through again.

  - The dead hand of the party rises

  Abbott's bravado and ‘values’ made little political sense in themselves, but fed into a Labor party becoming increasingly insecure with no real roots at home and a lack of support abroad.

  - How Labor made Abbott electable

  How do you change racial provisions in the Constitution when the entire infrastructure of land rights is based on it?

  - Caught in a racial trap

  Politics is becoming more cyclical, but only because the nature of politics is changing from what it was in the 20th century.

  - The problem of the “political cycle”

• Essay and Book reviews

  Latham is articulating a search for a new relationship of politics to society, based not on its representation, but on intervention on a degraded basis. You have been warned.

  Not Dead Yet by Mark Latham

  In reality under this complaint about the media lurks a political argument that is highly revealing about the mindset of the political class today.

  Sideshow by Lindsay Tanner

  Here is someone working for the ABC, from a Labor background as Hawke’s press secretary, who has written about the rise and fall of a Labor Prime Minister with all the distortions and omissions worthy of the most disingenuous right wing hack.

  The Party Thieves by Barrie Cassidy

  The most bizarre defence of the two party system comes over what for Megalogenis is the most personal – immigration.

  Trivial Pursuit by George Megalogenis

  Can Australian politics be that insubstantial?

  Confessions of a Faceless Man by Paul Howes
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It will be the breakdown of the factional system that will be the necessary precondition for the return of Rudd, but not sufficient.

It is wonderful to see such bipartisanship at work in our Parliament behind the personal attacks.

Whether they like it or not Rudd is the only one in Labor with enough popular support to be a battering ram against those holding power and who are the ultimate target of reform.

A change in Labor has the potential, therefore, to change the entire political scene.

OK, this is going to get messy.

This is a struggle over the dead soul of the Labor party.

This upside-down thinking of social reality is symptomatic of a political party in decline.

The media are making this into a major drama, but it may not be, at least in the way they say.

Can Australian politics be that insubstantial?

Australian politics in 2011 centres around one question: can Gillard shrug off the backers that put her into power?

Earlier posts →

• 

• Key Posts of the Autumn

  It is the loss of that social base that Labor is struggling to adapt to, not some problem of ideology.

  - The phoney problem of ideology

  At some point during the year the electorate will step in and break up what has been a delicate pas de deux between Gillard and Abbott for the last three years.

  - Last dance

  Rudd is the catalyst for the crisis in Labor because he is the first leader who has worked out how to turn acceptance of the irrelevance of Labor’s historical role into an electoral asset.

  - No solution without revolution

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