Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.
The essential truth about Donald Trump is that he does not do alliances or even friendships. He’s turned on NATO, on Ukraine, Canada, Denmark. Wait around long enough and he’ll find a reason to go after us.
The National Party should be placed in its proper context. Out of the nation’s 226 federal parliamentarians, only 18 identify as National Party MPs. That’s enough to require nothing bigger than a minibus to take them around.
If the government doesn’t seize this opportunity, take a big risk and invest its political capital in fixing the generational inequity diminishing our society, it will have wasted its moment.
As the opposition’s chief economic policymakers and advocates in the lead-up to the election just nine months ago, Taylor and Hume contributed mightily to the Coalition’s landslide defeat. But let’s face it: who hasn’t made a mistake or two at work?
Polls suggest support for the Liberals is disturbingly close to the level of backing for the Greens, which consistently hovers around 12 per cent. I’m in my fifth decade of writing about Australian politics, and I never expected to write those words.
Sussan Ley’s attempts to politicise the Bondi tragedy worked in the short term, but were ultimately an act of political self-sabotage.
Slagging off the man entrusted with trying to steer the nation through this powerfully difficult moment will not help John Howard’s side of politics.
Despite being tagged as a moderate in recent times, Sussan Ley has always been a political shapeshifter, never appearing to come from an identifiable philosophical base. As the leader, she is now but a placeholder.
Anthony Albanese understood that most voters, as they came out of the pandemic, wanted a cooler form of politics. The Coalition didn’t get the message.
Getting the breaks going your way is an often-underappreciated factor in a politician’s success or failure.