Labors fractional sub-factions active in the west
Factional manoeuvring is alive and well in the Labor Party.
The latest prime example occurred on Monday last week, at a meeting of the West Australian state executive. The headline story coming out of the nights proceedings in Perth was the choice of Joe Bullock to head Labor’s Senate ticket for the federal election. His success precipitated the retirement of Senator Mark Bishop, who no longer could get a winnable spot on the ticket.
The West Australian executive also had to fill a …

UNLESS there is an electoral miracle, the Gillard government will lose badly on September 14.
The election will be potentially devastating for Labor, especially in states like NSW and Queensland where it will lose some of its most talented members and possibly several senior ministers including Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer Wayne Swan.
In the aftermath Labor will need to use common sense and a strategic approach to rebuild the party. Indeed it needs to start thinking about that now, otherwise a coalition government led by Tony Abbott will be in office …

FORGET Simon Crean and Kim Beazley. Forget Joan Kirner and Carmen Lawrence. To my mind, the most talented Labor politician never to be prime minister of Australia was Edward Granville “Red Ted” Theodore, who became premier of Queensland and state treasurer on October 22, 1919. Exactly 10 years later, Theodore became federal treasurer in the ill-fated ALP government of James Scullin.
His Labor credentials were impeccable. Born in Adelaide on December 29, 1884, Theodore – who was of Romanian background – left school at 12 to gain work in the mines …

AT 11am on August 13, 1940, with Australia having been at war for almost a year, a dual-controlled Hudson bomber, the A16-97, crashed into a hillside near Canberra airport.
In what is still Canberra’s worst disaster in terms of loss of life, all 10 aboard died, including the chief of the general staff, Cyril Brudenell White, and three of Robert Gordon Menzies’ closest cabinet supporters: minister for the army Geoffrey Street, minister for air James Fairbairn and information minister Henry Gullett.
Perhaps the luckiest federal parliamentarian at the time was the minister …

MARK Bracegirdle was born in London on September 10, 1912. On Boxing Day 15 years later, he and his younger brother and their artistic mother, Ina, a suffragette and divorcee, arrived in Sydney, their move to Australia having been sponsored by the Salvation Army Migration Scheme.
A year later, Bracegirdle became a member of the Young Communist League, itself part of the recently formed Communist Party of Australia. However, his membership of the YCL may not have been widely known to Australian intelligence.
On April 4, 1936, Bracegirdle arrived by ship, the …

IN his address to the Sydney Institute on March 15, Tony Abbott announced that if he wins the federal election in September, “Australia will have a prime minister for indigenous affairs”.
He explained that all government agencies working on issues to do with Aboriginal Australia would in his new administration report to the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
The energetic Opposition Leader regularly spends one week each year doing volunteer work in remote communities in the Northern Territory and the fact that he allocated a full one-hour address to indigenous issues …