For those progressives who hail from Queensland, at least for the rank-and-file, the initials AWU stand for Australia’s Worst (or Weakest) Union. Similarly, when Kevin Rudd was Queensland’s leading apparatchik during the state Labor government of Wayne Goss and before entering federal politics, he was widely known as Dr Death. This was because of Rudd’s authoritarian ruthlessness and his utter lack of sympathy for trade unionists, working people and the poor.
Both these diaries – from the lead-up to the 2010 federal election campaign to its nail-biting finale – are based …

In 1982, Blanche d’Alpuget’s ‘ROBERT J HAWKE: A BIOGRAPHY’ was published to critical and popular acclaim. Her new book ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’ starts with Bob Hawke taking over as federal Labor leader from the unprepossessing Bill Hayden. In a matter of weeks, Hawke defeats Malcolm Fraser and, in the process, achieves his late mother’s, and his own, lifelong goal of becoming prime minister of Australia, our twenty-third PM in fact.
In the main, this four hundred page political biography of d’Alpuget’s silver- haired husband is well written and even handed. …

‘Ah, here’s the apostate.’ The voice was a cigarette-flavoured drawl from a slight figure with a hat tipped on his head. This, in the Bulletin office in March 1978, my first day as a journalist after six years with the Labor Council — hence the ‘apostate’. The speaker was Alan Reid, breaker of tabloid stories, most of them harmful to the Australian Labor Party, and, according to Paul Keating, an ‘infamous Labor hater’.
Labor wasn’t his only victim. John Grey Gorton, Liberal prime minister from 1968 to 1971, felt Reid had …

This fascinating study canvasses four generations of an extended family of Jewish atheists and committed communists who challenged the “established order” in Australia and overseas.
The book’s author, Mark Aarons, came under the “adverse notice” of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in early 1965 when he was only 13, while his father’s ASIO files began when he was 14, in the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the great strengths of The Family File is the extensive use made of the detailed reports of the many ASIO agents who successfully infiltrated the …

LIKE many journalists of his generation, Alan Reid ached to write a novel. He wasn’t thinking of something twee and literary, something that might be praised for its light touches and teasing ambiguities. He envisioned a roman a clef about contemporary political life, blunt and boisterous, the whiff of the abattoir strong in the nostrils, something that would get people talking and cash registers tinkling, as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory had done a few years earlier. It would be loaded with conspiracies. It had to be. Reid loved a …

More than half a century ago, the Catholic Church set out to take over Australian political life. The Church set up an underground organization to infiltrate political parties, to control their agenda, and to assume the leadership of their personnel. With church money, church facilities, and church authority, the organization had some noticeable successes. By 1952 it felt able to report that within a few years, Australian governments, federal and state, would be legislating its policies.
If this sounds shocking today, one should reflect that in a democracy it is legitimate …