Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
The centre of the political system did not so much hold as desert. The vote was a furious, determined and tenacious shout from the estranged centre, a shivering of the timbers. The calibre of individuals elected — many from professions, many with public service outside the traditional party hierarchy of patronage and promotion, and most, women — has not been previously seen in this country’s politics.
Governments lose elections, but Oppositions still must demonstrate that they are a capable alternative. Both the Morrison Coalition government and the Albanese Labor Opposition played their part last Saturday. There were many sub-plots in the pattern of voting, but this election was primarily lost and won in the four biggest mainland cities.
Perhaps the most dramatic individual result of the Federal election was that Menzies’s seat, Kooyong, has fallen to a Teal independent, Dr Monique Ryan. Xavier College sits in the Kooyong electorate, and Dr Ryan is a parent at the College. Dr Ryan proved to be an impressive candidate who ran as a good a local campaign as I have ever seen. It was marked by a strong engagement by many locals, and especially among professional women, and older residents.
I was invited to a party the night of the 2019 election. The night’s entertainment was invite-only, with long tables of bread and wine, and I stepped back from the sounds of celebration to hear the political coverage on my phone. Standing at the far window, I looked up to see people in the night below, out in the dark, silent. Behind me a party guest shouted over the noise ‘what happened?’ I looked away from those outside and answered: a loss.
Election campaigns can be defined by all sorts of things. Gaffes, negative ads, international incidents, public policy. It is trite but no less true to say that this federal election campaign has been much more about the first three rather than the last. The policy discussion has been edged into the election mix most seriously by various interest groups and by some of the macro party and independent candidates seeking election.
In purely economic terms, the upcoming Federal election is extremely unusual. The shut down of the Australian economy for almost two years because of health measures really has no precedent in our history. Only war can produce that type of shock. The Federal government’s financial response was as extreme as the state of emergency measures, including a sharp increase in Australian government debt. It remains to be seen, however, if the government gets much credit for injecting so much free money into the economy. It is unlikely.
On May 3, the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, vented his fury in parliament at ‘the continual demonstration of lack of trust by the concerned parties, and tacit warning of military intervention in Solomon Islands if their national interest is undermined in Solomon Islands.’ The targets of the speech — Australia and the United States — were clear enough.
Whoever is Prime Minister after the election on May 21, he will need to address the question of Indigenous recognition in the Australian Constitution. This is the sixth election in a row when the question has been a live, unresolved issue during the election campaign. The patience of Indigenous leaders is understandably wearing thin. Trust is waning. There is still no clear path ahead. So where to from here?
The danger is that unless commissions and inquiries are accompanied by other ways of telling other truths they will inadvertently help to shrink that national story into the story of victims who in fact have never been only victims, and of unmentioned perpetrators who in fact have never been only perpetrators. They risk preaching to a more-or-less converted majority and to an implacably unconverted minority.
The Church must speak up to be relevant, but those who seek to ‘speak for the church’ must be brave. They risk exposing themselves to claims of bias unless they stick to a very narrow agenda and speak in extremely measured terms. Yet if they are too bland they risk being irrelevant to the sharp end of political debate and their intervention becomes little more than a symbolic ritual.
85-96 out of 200 results.