Julia Gillard did not just announce an election for September 14 in her first big speech of 2013. She challenged the whole Australian political system to assume a new level of maturity, transparency and integrity.

She held out the prospect of an election that would be fought on the basis of economic reality; one in which all parties have seven months to set out their policy prescri...

According to Liberal frontbencher Eric Abetz, the Australian Greens Party is the “epitome of extremism”. Talk about the pot calling the kettle extremist.

Abetz was inspired to his alliterative epithet because a couple of Greens Senators, notably party leader Christine Milne, refused to condemn the anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan, over a hoax which — for about 90 minutes, until i...

I picked up James, age three-and-a-half, after his first day at preschool in Massachusetts, where we had lately gone to live for a few years.

“How was it, mate?” I asked, knowing already from the look on his face that it had been okay, but that he also was glad to see me after his half-day among these new people with their funny accents.

“Goo-ood,” he said, in a tone somewher...

There are times, like last week, when you despair at the capacity of our politicians to obfuscate. But there are times, too, when the political process can be refreshingly clarifying.

One great example of that is a report delivered on Wednesday by the Senate environment and communciations legislation committee, which did a lot to clear the air on wind turbines. It didn’t get mu...

Short of getting sued, there is probably nothing more mortifying for an Australian journalist, or at least one who takes his or her professional reputation seriously, than an unfavourable mention on the ABC Media Watch program.

I speak from experience. I’ve never been successfully sued, but I did once suffer a spray on Media Watch.

It was humiliating, notwithstanding the fact...

Anthony Albanese, the government’s leader in the House, does have a nice way of summing things up sometimes.

There he was on morning TV Wednesday, talking about the Opposition’s “smear campaign” (to use Labor’s preferred terminology) relating to Julia Gillard and the AWU “slush fund” (to use the Opposition’s preferred terminology), and noting Tony Abbott’s silence on the issue....

It’s a wonderful word, mendacious, on account of its ambiguity.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary (Concise Edition), mendacious has two meanings. It can mean either “false or untrue” or “lying or untruthful”.

You see the distinction.

By the first definition, mendacious is a relatively mild word, for a statement can be false without being a lie.

If I t...

Somewhere about two-thirds of the way through Julia Gillard’s most recent epic press conference early on Monday afternoon, one reporter attempted to ask a question relating to a matter of some substance and relevance.

His subject of interest was sexual and physical abuse within the Australian Defence Force.

Earlier in the day, in response to several hundred plausible allegati...

If fuels were drugs, then coal would be heroin. It is to environmental good health what smack is to personal good health. Industrial civilisation has been addicted to coal for centuries, and it’s killing us.

Even the World Bank now sees climate change as a dire threat.

Only the woefully ignorant and those corrupted by vested interests now deny the urgent need to de-carbonise ...

There was a time when federal parliamentary Question Time was the best show in town. The people came in droves in hope of seeing one of then Treasurer and Prime Minister Paul Keating’s sporadic star rhetorical turns.

Now, sometimes, it was disappointing; sometimes he skated over the edge into crude and brutal language. “Dogs returning to their own vomit,” is the one most often ...

Tony Abbott is looking a bit beaten down these days. He has been for a little while actually.

People who watch these things closely — and that means almost everyone in this merciless place — are noticing and reacting.

In the press gallery, that means lots of speculation over coffee, if not yet so much in print and on air, about who might replace him. Give it a couple more of ...

Whatever her other virtues, Greens leader Senator Christine Milne is not usually thought of as a satirist.

But at her press conference early yesterday, called to record her party’s opposition to the latest attempt by the government to stop the flow of asylum seekers to our shores, she brought a prop that brilliantly lampooned the new plan.

It was a map of the world, with one ...

They call it American exceptionalism. It holds that America is culturally superior to the rest of the world, a beacon to the rest of the world, and has an evangelical mission to spread American values to the rest of the world.

President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney paid due lip service to it in the last of this election’s three Presidential debates, th...

The old political maxim goes that sincerity is the secret of success; once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Well, Mitt Romney has a long way to go on the fake sincerity front. He may smile and frown at all the right places in debate, he may have mastered the Ronald Reagan diction, but the effect is not the tiniest bit real.

And that, I would suggest, was never more obvious th...

My only question is this: If Barack Obama were to come down with a bad case of laryngitis just before his next debate with Mitt Romney, could he send his understudy instead?

After the President’s metaphorical speechlessness in the first debate, actual speechlessness might be Obama’s best tactic next time round.

Let Smokin’ Joe do it.

Seriously, Joe Biden’s performan...

So there was the ABC’s uber-interviewer, Tony Jones, on Lateline Thursday night, bumping on and on and on in the same stupid rut as all the rest of them, as he interviewed Treasurer Wayne Swan. Did he accept Julia Gillard’s assertion that Tony Abbott was “a misogynist, a woman-hater?” he asked.

Then, after getting an answer, he asked again: “The word means, literally, ‘The...