Learning the lessons from “robodebt”

If we want to avoid another Robodebt, the government needs to look at broader reform on automated government decision-making and measures to strengthen the public service.

The Milky Bar kid

Kevin Rudd was seen as a breath of fresh air after replacing the long serving John Howard as Australia’s Prime Minister in 2007 but leadership battles with Julia Gillard and a failure to embrace radical reform doomed his premiership to failure.

This is my truth, now tell me yours

British Labour icon Nye Bevan popularised Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “This is my truth, now tell me yours” 80 years ago, but the challenge remains as aposite as ever.

Post mortem

The Liberal’s effort to bury their own election review has predictably backfired, with the Streisand effect ensuring the scathing report has received even more publicity than its publication would have done.

How One Nation took the nation

Long disdained or ignored by the mainstream media, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is now threatening Labor as well as eclipsing the Liberals as public concern over mass immigration grows.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Roman poet Juvenal asked “Who will watch the watchmen?” two thousand years ago and the question remains as apposite as ever, as a population suffused with “bread and circuses” scarcely bats an eye at their rulers’ excesses.

A four-way tussle for Farrer

Sussan Ley’s decision to leave Parliament after losing the Liberal Party leadership will provoke a fascinating by-election whose result may shape the future of right wing politics in this country.

Mister Ed

The recent election of Angus Taylor as the new leader of the Liberal Party has prompted much discussion about the new direction it may take but should also draw attention to dubious business linked with both parties.

Not waving, but drowning

The Liberal’s leadership switch is an admission of how bad things have become as the party loses support on the right to One Nation and the left to the Teals, but the new leader’s grand plan amounts to ‘Trust me, Bro.”

Crisis? What crisis? Aristocratic terrorism

In a new 3-part series, Bernard Cordon argues the Chicago school of monetarist economics in the 1970s and the neo-liberal political movement which followed in the 1980s set the scene for Donald Trump’s thuggish dismantling of the USA today.

Why preferential voting beats first past the post

Some conservatives want a return to first past the post voting, but the history of Australian elections shows that preference voting allows Parliament to reflect the will of the people with the greatest accuracy.

Is it really getting harder to govern?

Is governing harder in the 2020s than in earlier decades? The instinctive, and popular, answer would be “of course it is” but the truth is always more complex.