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Archived news for June 2010 | Recent news
Chasing the xenophobic vote
Tony Abbott must be feeling a little like Victorian opposition leader Ted Baillieu this week. For the last 12 months, Baillieu has been trying to...
Coup is good news for Whitlam
Julia Gillard has a lot to thank Kevin Rudd for. The failure of Rudd's personal leadership style gave Tony Abbott a fighting chance at changing the...
Expediency spelt his exit
If you act like a NSW Labor premier, you get treated like one. In the end Kevin Rudd came to be perceived by the electorate as concerned only with...
Speak out, Robert Manne: Ken Henry silences dissent
If Australian bureaucrats were bound by baseball rules, Treasury secretary Ken Henry has had his three strikes, and it's time to go back to the...
No more frank and fearless
On Treasury's conservative estimates, the super profits tax on miners, as well as foreclosing new projects, is a grab on profits of existing...
PM's economic shambles
The government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has not lived up to its early promise. Rudd is not an economic conservative; the surplus is gone, and...
Ruddtopia: fool's gold
In October 2006 Kevin Rudd published his now famous Brutopia essay in The Monthly magazine. One paragraph in particular stands out. There is a...
Privatisation is not enough
State governments cannot seem to rein in spending so it matches their revenues. The upshot is skyrocketing debt levels. The NSW and Queensland...
It's alive, after a fashion
Tony Abbott is a strange person to run an anti-tax, anti-spending election campaign. Sure, Abbott got the leadership on the back of a simple phrase...
States look beyond the power of one supplier
Fifteen years after Victoria privatised its electricity industry, New South Wales is dipping its toe into those same waters. But its focus is on...