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Keywords: Labor Leadership

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott's night of the short knives

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 September 2013
    6 Comments

    Under the US revolving door model, top public service jobs are held by staff who are openly politically affiliated. When government changes, they go back to their jobs as special interest Washington lobbyists. Australians have made clear we don't like that system. It is open to corruption, and when our governments flirt with it, they usually come to regret it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Lessons for Labor from across the Tasman

    • Cecily McNeill
    • 18 September 2013
    2 Comments

    As the Australian Labor Party embarked on its month-long process towards a grassroots election of a leader to replace Kevin Rudd, the New Zealand Labour Party was ending its long and sometimes brutal election of a new leader. The lesson from across the Tasman is that a grassroots election of a leader can broaden the base of those with a say in the party's destiny, and steer it back towards a more traditional social democratic stance.

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  • MEDIA

    Sarah Hanson-Young's Zoo suit righteous

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 16 September 2013
    15 Comments

    Putting aside the outrageousness of 'jokingly' offering sanctuary to asylum seekers in exchange for an Australian senator posing for a lad's magazine, Zoo's actions simply tell us that mouthy women with an opinion can be dealt with by reducing them to sexual objects. And that objectification directly affects how women are perceived.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The public, the Church, and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.

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  • EDUCATION

    Paradox and possibility: The example of Francis

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'You are the first generation of Catholic educators who will not have members of religious orders or congregations present in any number at all in your staff rooms and in your classrooms. Thus the need for lay Catholic educators to cultivate their spirituality while also being attentive to the demands of Church and the Church hierarchy.' 6th International Conference on Catholic Educational Leadership, Sydney, 13 August 2013.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Election advice from ancient Rome

    • Dustin Halse
    • 12 August 2013
    11 Comments

    In 64 BC, the brilliant orator and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero decided to run for the highest office in the Roman Republic. His younger brother Quintus, who possessed a penchant for the most outrageous acts of cruelty, penned a detailed memo outlining what his older brother needed to do to win the election. The current Australian federal election campaign would appear familiar to the Cicero brothers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's shrinking moral and intellectual horizons

    • Ray Cassin
    • 05 August 2013
    5 Comments

    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. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The alchemy of Australia's personality politics

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 July 2013
    9 Comments

    Voters find it difficult to buy ideas wholesale when they don't make sense in retail. Imagine a voter who would like to see the Labor Party build on reforms in education and health but cannot abide its policy on asylum seekers. This is where the focus on personalities actually matters. Much of the dissatisfaction with leaders ultimately rests on a public assessment of the way policies are prosecuted.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Democracy reigns in Rudd's participation nation

    • Ray Cassin
    • 10 July 2013
    9 Comments

    Most voters think that when they fill in a ballot paper they are choosing between the prime minister and the opposition leader. And the fact that they think this makes it so, regardless of the niceties of constitutional theory. The system Rudd is proposing would narrow the gap between voter perceptions and the power of parliamentary blocs to ignore them.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatic answers to the asylum seeker question

    • Frank Brennan
    • 27 June 2013
    10 Comments

    'I want to outline the contours for a better approach — better than forcibly turning around boats, better than transporting people to Nauru and Manus Island or to Malaysia to join an asylum queue of 100,000 or permitting people to reside in the Australian community but without work rights and with inadequate welfare provision.' Frank Brennan speaks at the Australian Catholic University National Asylum Summit 2013.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rudd's second coming

    • Ray Cassin
    • 27 June 2013
    21 Comments

    Can Rudd fare any better? He is a formidable campaigner and consistently rates well above either Abbott or Gillard when poll respondents are asked who is their preferred prime minister. What is more, Labor has a success story to tell about the economy, which the Government thus far has failed to sell. Rudd tells this story without illusions.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Spare a thought for luckless Gillard

    • Moira Rayner
    • 27 June 2013
    37 Comments

    Anyone who knows how it feels to lose a career in mid life will understand how Gillard is feeling today. Now that a most gracious acknowledgement of personal defeat has been given by the first woman to step up to the hardest political job anyone could be asked to do, we must find the time to consider and learn from what we have witnessed about how the country is run.

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