The chainsaws were finally ordered to stop in what remains of the native forests in Western Australia and eastern Victoria on New Year's Day, throwing into sharp relief the absence of any similar policy in NSW or federally, despite unambiguous economic and scientific arguments.

Labor recently said goodbye to one of its heroes, Bill Hayden, sometimes referred to as the greatest prime minister Australia never had. He was pushed aside as party leader by Bob Hawke in 1983. Soon after, Hawke was elected to replace Malcolm Fraser as PM. As Hayden memorably put it in a moment of bitterness, 'a drover's dog' could have led Labor to victory at that time, but in the end it was a silver bodgie who took the prize.

Being a Ten Pound Pom, I knew nothing of the history of massacres and dispossession of this continent’s first peoples when I arrived here in 1965.

Parliament hasn't been sitting this week in Canberra, but the ramifications of recent federal budget decisions continue to ripple out, with the student debts of three million Australians rising 7.1 percent, in line with inflation.

This weekend we’ll commemorate the 49th anniversary of September 11, 1973, when a fascist military coup d’etat, backed by the Nixon administration, was conducted on a democratically elected government on the other side of the world, Chile.

One of Australia’s leading political biographers and academic commentators on terrorism laws will speak at the Mullumbimby Courthouse Hotel on March 27.

In The Dismissal Dossier Professor Jenny Hocking exposes the definitive story of the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government bringing together a mixture of the unknown, the overlooked and the clandestine.

Charles and Camilla wafted into Australia last week, to be greeted by rapturous applause by the usual suspects. As the ageing heir and his second wife preened and postured for the well-drilled spectators the royalists gushed, led by their self-appointed leader David Flint, a comedic courtier whose silliness is only exceeded by his vanity.