The Latest Breaking News from Alfred Deakin

Australia has a fine tradition of unconventional politicians at all levels of government. Multiple examples probably spring to mind immediately.

Suddenly everyone is talking about the “Australian way”. This is partly a nervous response by the prime minister to the reelection of Donald Trump, and partly (relatedly) a desire more generally to talk about “Australian values”.

In September 1953, Rupert Murdoch arrived in sleepy Adelaide to take up his inheritance of News Limited. He was only 22 and had little experience of working at a newspaper, let alone running one, but his family had inherited a majority stake in the company following the death of Rupert’s…

Peter Dutton’s defensive posture of just appealing to "the base’" and trying to hold the Liberals together may prove the losing gambit.

Party stability on the progressive side of politics, and repeated party reconfiguration on the conservative side of politics, is a marked contrast in the history of Australia’s two-party political system.

The idea of a “forgotten prime minister” may seem laughable. For Australian historians, it is the governed rather than the governors who need rescuing “from the enormous condescension of posterity” as the English historian E. P. Thompson famously put it.

The solicitor-general’s recent finding that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s furtive accrual of ministerial portfolios “fundamentally undermined” the principles of responsible government has drawn attention to the precarity of democracy. In seeking to safeguard our democracy, we must consider the extent to which Australians’ long-standing apathy about our democratic system…

Some wondered that the fury of March4Justice rapidly dissipated. But the women of Australia were following a feminist adage: don’t get angry, get organised