BACK in the 1960s and 1970s, before the internet, before WikiLeaks, there was something called the alternative press. Sometimes it was called the underground press, with echoes of armed partisans resisting an occupying army.
It claimed to offer the real information, all the news the media refused to print and that governments tried to suppress.
But what if it was all a fraud? Sydney-based Michael Wilding’s new novel ‘The Prisoner Of Mount Warning’ explores this hypothesis.
What if the alternative, or some of it, was not alternative at all but run by an …

FRUSTRATED by the NSW Parliament, which has made it virtually impossible for the Australian Sex Party to be registered for the state election, its convenor Fiona Patten has hit upon a unique strategy.
White Pages in hand, Patten is currently actively seeking at least 15 people in NSW who have the word “sex” in their name – Sexton, Sexsmith and so on.
If she can find enough, and if they agree with Sex Party policies, this will enable the group to form a ticket for the NSW Upper House even though the …

Her political inheritance was replete with riches but the Queensland Premier has squandered it
ANNA Bligh is only surviving as Queensland Premier because there is no one else willing to lead the ALP into near certain defeat at the next state election due in 2012. The Bligh government is a political disaster lurching from one terrible poll result to the next.
There is no doubt the poor standing of the Bligh government was a significant contributing factor to the ALP’s poor showing in the federal election. Based on a post-redistribution assessment, the …

IN political terms, the stakes in the aftermath of the 2010 election have rarely, if ever, been higher. The disunited Australian Labor Party must salvage something from the wreckage of the election after its disastrous campaign left Julia Gillard a damaged leader with her political future resting on her capacity to form government.
The machine men that installed Gillard into the leadership are also sweating on the outcome given that their present, and in some cases aspiring, political careers are hanging in the balance.
Bill Shorten is positioning himself for Gillard’s inevitable …

The hiatus in federal politics since the election last weekend says a lot about the state of the two-party system in Australia.
Clearly, it’s in a state of flux.
As of last weekend, there are now three major parties in Australian politics and that will not change for many years to come. The Greens will be a part of government in Australia for the foreseeable future, as the Liberal Democrats are in England and so will the issues that they represent. Many pundits are saying that this will destabilise good government, but …

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. …