Category: Inside Story

The Greens had luck running their way. Sometimes everything just comes together: you play the perfect game, cook the perfect meal or make the perfect coffee. In the ACT, the Greens just had the perfect election. They went in aspiring to treble their representation from two members to six in

Thanks to new rules and deft moderating by Kristen Welker, the second presidential debate was nowhere near the debacle of the first, but it still did little to enlighten viewers about the policies and programs each candidate would take into their presidency next year. Like tigers, Trump hasn’t changed his

Twelve days from the presidential election, leading American polling analysts at FiveThirtyEight give Joe Biden a ten percentage point lead over Donald Trump, 52.1–42.2. The other leading aggregator, RealClearPolitics, has the race somewhat closer, 50.6–43.0, giving Biden a still-comfortable lead of just under eight points. Neither site has detected anything

A crisis is hovering behind the scenes of Victoria’s much-anticipated release from pandemic lockdown. In suburbs around Melbourne, the longed-for announcement that businesses and retail can reopen is expected to trigger the eviction from their homes of over one hundred refugees and people seeking asylum, who have been living in

Josh Frydenberg didn’t have a good election last year. For only the second time since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1946, the federal treasurer’s pedigreed Melbourne electorate of Kooyong returned a primary vote below 50 per cent. (The first occasion was in 1972.) There were several reasons: a

In an interview when her book Bad Faith was published in 2007, Australian-born Carmen Callil — now Dame Carmen Callil for her services to literature — spoke about being scared. She claimed to have been scared when she started Virago, arguably the first and the premier feminist publishing house in

For the tenth year in a row, the Australian National Audit Office, the agency that brought us the sports rorts affair and revealed that the federal government had massively overpaid for land in Western Sydney, had its funding cut in the federal budget. The ANAO is not alone. Government funding

“I’m sitting in a building here that was built for 5000 people… and there are probably six in it today,” National Australia Bank CEO Ross McEwan told me recently during a parliamentary committee hearing. But there’s more: according to the bank’s surveys, four-fifths of staff members don’t want to return

Little did I know that the very concerns I raised in my submission to the parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s diaspora communities would play out at the committee hearing in Canberra last Wednesday, the day I had been asked to attend and share my thoughts. I had made a written submission

The International Energy Agency attracted attention recently when executive director Fatih Birol declared that solar would be “the new king of electricity markets.” Long known for its conservative view of renewables, the IEA’s latest Global Energy Review marked a radical change. Instead of growing slowly over time, solar (along with

The big question mark over Jacinda Ardern’s second term as NZ prime minister is whether she can make good on her December 2017 declaration that she would lead a “government of transformation.” Her government’s first three-year term was more a repair shop than an innovative enterprise of deep reform. Now

In California, the Republican Party has set out a series of fraudulent ballot drop boxes, hoping to entice unsuspecting voters into accidentally throwing away their ballot. In Texas, the governor ordered real ballot drop boxes to be winnowed to one per county, leaving Harris County’s four million–plus residents with a