Quadrant, Vol. 59, No. 3, Mar 2015: 44-49   Over more than two decades, David Day’s grand thesis in his book Menzies & Churchill at War—that Robert Menzies returned from England in April 1941 after positioning himself to take Churchill’s job—has failed to find support among historians. Nevertheless, it has taken root in popular Australian…

Barack Obama recently forced through congress an extension of the Bush tax cuts for another two years, in spite of heated opposition from many Democrats. The tax cuts repudiate the President’s economic policy and signal a shift from government stimulus to tax relief as a means of pushing US economic recovery. Significant sections of the…

BOB Katter wants a return of tariffs, Rob Oakeshott wants to overturn the party system. And Tony Windsor increasingly sounds as if he’d like another election. After seven decades, Australians woke up on Sunday morning to the phenomenon of a hung federal parliament. Like Ali Babas outside the cave, ready to load up their camels,…

With Julia Gillard’s ascension last week, Australians witnessed momentous history. More than six decades ago, a very different woman became Australia’s first female member of the House of Representatives. As a conservative, Dame Enid Lyons nominated for the seat of Darwin (now Braddon), campaigned with a handful of helpers against two party colleagues and four…

OPPOSITION Leader Malcolm Turnbull and his deputy Julie Bishop have offered bipartisan co-operation with the Rudd Government in the face of a global credit crisis and looming recession. As Bishop put it to Laurie Oakes on the Nine Network last Sunday, there are a number of Opposition members with years of government experience and they…

ELECTED in a landslide, the new Howard government quickly set in place an administration that would define its character for over a decade. The message was direct and strong; Labor had squandered Australia’s good fortune, leaving a budget deficit for 1995-96 of $10billion (Kim Beazley’s “black hole”). Thrift and budget cuts would need to be…

Photos of the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, meeting the United States Vice-President, Dick Cheney, at the White House said it all. Back home, the cabinet ministers Nicola Roxon, Jenny Macklin and Penny Wong echoed that message as they faced opponents in the former cabinet minister and deputy Opposition leader Julie Bishop and the former…

Political power couples are suddenly all the rage – Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, while Down Under there is Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull. While Kevin Rudd’s wife Therese Rein may prefer to say little publicly while running her own business, husband and wife partnerships in politics have taken off. And while they…

Call it the result of our obsession with the famous or a new era for wives and ex-wives (even soccer WAGS have web pages during the World Cup), today’s sidekicks and partners – former or continuing – of the famous are of interest to publishers. The stories they can tell, the people they have known,…

IN these secular times, celebrity-styled and self-appointed moral guardians have long replaced church leaders as the average person’s guide to the higher moral ground. Al Gore and his message on climate change is but the latest. In Australia to promote his film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore was given extremely soft interviews by Kerry O’Brien on…