Of the numerous friendships Sir James Killen had during his long political career, the most interesting was that with the colleague he admired above all others, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies. I have written elsewhere that my late friend lamented the almost total absence of any contact with Malcolm Fraser in his retirement. But he rejoiced […]

With the appointment of Sir Laurence Street to look into the DPP’s decision not to prosecute we’ll get some genuinely knowledgeable insights into this matter. Hopefully his decision will be accepted, even if he does find that a trial should not proceed. In the meantime, I think a lot of the anger has been misdirected, […]

One Democrat to another – it’s the preference deals that count. Many have been predicting the end of the Australian Democrats at the next federal election. Those people can’t count. But the Victorian Democratic Labor Party can, and their two victories in the Victorian upper house demonstrate that even with a vote lower than 3% […]

Queensland Liberal Leader Bruce Flegg is going to the Internet with the issue of recycling water for domestic uses. It’s a critical one for Brisbane where dams are at critical levels and the government procrastinates, playing for political safety by promising to run a $10M plebiscite on the issue in March next year. He’s established […]

I’ve been following the story of the extinction of Australia’s megafauna for some time. It originally seemed reasonable to blame man as the extinction occurred at about the same time as we arrived in Australia – about BC 40,000. This fitted the pattern of other extinctions in other parts of the world where the arrival […]

I have been watching election night television and radio coverage for more than four decades, but it took until Saturday night’s ABC television coverage of the Victorian election to see the worst ever “performance” by a panellist. The ABC coverage normally leads the way – with Kerry O’Brien as anchor, and Antony Greene doing the […]

I’m unfamiliar with Victorian electoral laws, but in a just system, you’d think that the Greens would have the right to challenge the result, at least in Melbourne, if the Labor campaign was anything like it was in Northcote. The pamphletts reproduced below were provided by Benno Spearritt who lives in Northcote. One would assume […]

Steve Bracks joins John Cain as the only Labor Premier of Victoria to win three successive elections. As we predicted the Greens did well in a number of inner city seats, but not well enough to win any. Overall their vote was similar to last election, so hardly a resounding success. It augurs well for […]

This is a second piece of analysis by Mark Bahnisch, which you can also read at Crikey! The Victorian election is the first to be held since the crystallisation of the link between the drought and climate change has fundamentally shifted the politics of both the environment and infrastructure across Australia. Quantitative and qualitative research […]

Because of the small sample from the Victorian election (only 254 responses), and the strong skew to the Greens, I haven’t done too much analysis of the data to-date. You can make some useful quantitative conclusions from our qualitative surveys when there is a large enough sample, and if you are very careful (and maybe […]