March, 2010

Will Caucus allow unproven, dangerous changes to income management to go through? How do you balance expert evidence and personal communications and opinions? asks Eva Cox.

As revelation after revelation of widespread criminality, cruelty and cover-ups in the RC church continue, the outfit is caught in a bind. In older days, such events could be acknowledged in a theological manner – man is born in sin, evil is abroad in the world, even within the church, striving for a way out [...]

Nick Minchin was an indifferent minister.  He was promoted from Special Minister of State to Industry after the 1998 election, and then after 2001 replaced John Fahey as Finance Minister.  While he oversaw some substantial public sector reforms like those flowing from the Uhrig Report, he was fated to be Finance Minister during the two [...]

‘You can trust us – we will never be in government’-  that was the rather unusual boast of the KKE in Greece in the recent and ongoing general strike. It’s been a cardinal point of the party (it’s the Commies) that any attenpt to form a coalition under capitalism would lead to a role of [...]

The consensus going into today’s health debate was that Kevin Rudd had gambled by proposing a debate with Tony Abbott on health – Abbott was a more effective communicator than Rudd, Abbott didn’t have a policy to defend and could simply point out the flaws in Rudd’s policy, the mere act of agreeing to a [...]

Join the Crikey Team, plus an expert panel of our regular commentators including Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane, Croakey‘s Melissa Sweet and pundit Richard Farmer, as we live-blog the big Rudd-Abbott health reform smack-down at 12:30pm today.

In June 2008, Nick Minchin gave a speech to the Senate as a valedictory to the Australian Democrats, as it was the week that party lost representation in the federal Parliament after a presence of over 30 years. To boost the mood of the Democrats there that night, Senator Minchin kindly outlined “one of the [...]

One way or another the Government was determined to get the focus back on health today.  Throughout the week Question Time had been a back-and-forth between a Government grilling itself incessantly about health – whether its own health policies or those of Tony Abbott as Health minister – and an Opposition determined to steer discussion [...]

One effect of the recent feverish hype around Australia Day is that the Australian flag has come to seem like a seasonal decoration. The Christmas tinsel gets taken down and replaced with flag adorned gizmos, and a few weeks later, the bargain bins are full of cut-price Santas and flags. It can be a good [...]