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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
In ten days I will cast a vote for the first time. I must admit that - unlike many teenagers my age - I do take an interest in political affairs. I know how parliament works and occasionally watch political shows on the ABC. My brother has told me that this is 'really sad'. Voting will be better than receiving a fine in the mail from the Australian Electoral Commission.
Abbott successfully damped down his glee in the taunting and negativity which he aimed so cruelly at the first woman prime minister, when she withdrew from the internal stoush she couldn't win. In the first round both he and Rudd offered the most boring, stagey and value-free 'debate' we have witnessed since the days of Billy McMahon. But the blokes got aggro and personal in the second.
Disrepute and disaster are twins. If suspicion persists that football players were encouraged to take drugs whose long term effects are unknown, it would lead parents to discourage their children from playing the game at senior level, with incalculable commercial consequences. It is a much more serious thing to bring a nation's polity into disrepute. And that sadly is what the military rulers of Egypt have done.
Hot-button topics such as economic management and asylum seekers are best seen from a wide lens, yet we seem determined to keep the rest of the world out of the frame. It is a sea-girt mentality that our politicians don't care to take apart because it is too hard to convince the average voter that there are in fact other people on the planet. Such denialism will inevitably leave us ill-prepared for significant challenges.
It is hard to imagine that those living in disadvantaged communities would find great personal interest in the things that matter at election time. Interest rates and mortgages, rates of company tax and paid maternity leave are issues for the advantaged. They are problems of managing income that those without it might like to have.
If the last three years have been like the first three years of the First World War, now is the time for a final blitzkrieg. The treatment of people who seek protection in Australia is not simply one of many election issues. It is a measure of how far each political party will go, how much damage each will be prepared to do to Australia's honour, reputation, economic interests and relationships in order to gain and hold power.
It is economically illiterate nonsense to equate the state of the budget with the state of the economy, yet Labor and the Coalition have acquiesced in the view that delivering a surplus is the sole indicator of responsible economic management. If this election campaign fails to inspire many voters and drives some to disengage, it will be in large part because of where the contending parties stand or, more importantly, refuse to stand.
Pearson and I scarcely ever agreed about anything, but I look back on the Adelaide Review's ragtag, cavalier youth with gratitude and affection. Likewise my time as a columnist with the brazen, short-lived Melbourne Partisan magazine. They were heady days, fuelled by rampant idealism, up-jumped confidence, booze, and the erratic, fortunate combination of various talents.
193-200 out of 200 results.