Columnists
The Goanna
Abbott's Parental Leave Recipe: How to make a policy without a policy
Tony Abbott sat down one morning at the kit-chen bench and thought "I need to cook up a new idea to bug the hell out of the Rudd govern-ment... but I'll need to write a recipe first." He took a pen and began to write...
Peter Hartcher
Hockey takes a stand, muzzling the loose cannons
Joe Hockey is making a commendable effort to be a serious figure in Australian politics. The pink fairy tutu he wore on TV didn't help. Actually, he didn't wear it, so much as clutch over his groin and sway his hips self-consciously while waving a wand in a game of charades.
Michelle Grattan
All eyes south as states vote to put federal pollies in a spin
The elections in Tasmania and South Australia will be fought on local issues but will be closely watched by Canberra.
Katharine Murphy
When Benjamin Button went to Canberra
How did they all get older so suddenly, I wondered as I scanned the government's frontbench from my usual vantage point in Parliament House? It's only February. Most of these ministers got a reasonable break at Christmas, by Rudd government standards.
Miranda Devine
Ghouls shower Bingle with scorn
Three weeks ago, Sydney's latest whipping girl, Lara Bingle, updated her busy Twitter account with a prophetic message to the 10,000 people signed on to receive her tweets. ''I just wonder just how many of my followers are actually haters!'' she wrote on February 21.
Ross Gittins
Think small - and other capital ideas
I don't know if I'm getting any wiser but, certainly, the older I get the more I conclude that small is beautiful. I've discovered there's a big phrase to make that strengthening prejudice sound deeply intellectual.
Jessica Irvine
To stop this hogwash, pull trigger
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is a TV weatherman forced to cover the same story about a groundhog emerging from hibernation four years in a row, forced to relive the same unbearable day over and over again. For what seems an eternity, every morning is reset by a bedside clock ticking over from 5.59 to 6, triggering Sonny and Cher's I Got You Babe until an announcer chimes in with: ''That's right woodchuck chuckers, it's Groundhog Day!''
Annabel Crabb
Art of the poisoned pen
Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Matthew Parris and Matt Price added to the democratic tradition by lampooning elected representatives of the people. Annabel Crabb explains the dangerous craft of the political sketch writer.
Stephanie Peatling
Risk of throwing out baby with bathwater
The stance of the Greens and independents is jeopardising the introduction of any form of paid maternity leave by the government.
Shaun Carney
Pox on both houses
The government's intentions are becoming clear: a double dissolution election will be held within six months.
Marian Wilkinson
G77 plays game of chicken as time runs out
COPENHAGEN: As the climate conference moved towards its climax, with Prince Charles and the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, preparing to speak on the urgency of acting on climate change, inside and outside the giant meeting hall proceedings ground to a halt.
Paul Sheehan
PM's obsession rolls on, taking hospitals in the wrong direction
Jane Halton is the consummate Canberra mandarin. She is also a consummate political survivor and adaptor. She has been running government departments for much of the part eight years, since she was 42, for both the Howard and Rudd governments. She is even the daughter of a Canberra mandarin. (Her father, Charles, was secretary of the Department of Transport.) Now she has been charged with helping — indirectly and impartially — deliver a federal election victory for Kevin Rudd this year.
Phillip Coorey
The politics of cattiness, drip-feeds and control
The ABC's telecast of Kevin Rudd's speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, in which he announced his health reform policy, ended at 1.39pm. Just 22 minutes later the Family First senator, Steve Fielding, issued an 11-paragraph media release canning the policy as a half-baked rearrangement of the deckchairs that would do nothing to reduce hospital waiting times.
Mike Carlton
Abbott gives business mates a bout of postnatal depression
So there I was, lunching at the Union Club on Monday, when who should walk in but good old Todger Fingleton. Lovely chap, Todger. We've known each other since we rowed in the Eight at King's; these days we share a ski lodge at Aspen, the yacht at Antibes, and we sit on half a dozen corporate boards together.
Daniel Flitton
Travel warning system hindering ties
Only an Indonesian president could do it. Successive Australian leaders have tried and failed, but Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has set a new tone for ties with our crucial northern neighbour.
Andrew Clennell
Keneally is just a different jockey on the same horse
Labor's general secretary Matt Thistlethwaite is said to have told MPs earlier this month that the party, at its current standing, risked winning just 16 to 20 seats at the next election, down from its current 52. The indications are it doesn't matter who leads the party, this sort of annihilation is on the way.
Cynthia Banham
US looks in our direction for wisdom on drought
A few hours out of San Diego, taking the scenic route along Highway 1 to San Francisco, I spotted a large creature by the roadside. We turned the car around and joined a few people taking a closer look. Lolling on the grass, like a beautiful giant slug, was an elephant seal.
Paul Austin
Whoever wins, Labor loses as Brumby, Rudd swap swipes
Health is Labor's home ground, and the Rudd and Brumby governments are both facing elections this year, so their decision to go to war over the future of Australia's hospitals is not just bizarre, it's dangerous. Federally, Labor invented Medicare. Such is its popularity that the conservatives have never quite found the courage to dismantle it.
Catherine Deveny
Remember, you heard it here
Note this moment. Because there'll be a day when you're asked, ''Where were you when you first heard of vajazzling?'' I thought if I alerted you to the existence of vajazzling here in the privacy of our one-on-one reading communion, the damage would be contained. It would mean your shock-induced coughing fit resulting in latte spraying out of your nose would occur here, preventing you the public humiliation of spitting your drink into someone's face when the conversation turned to vajazzling and you innocently asked, ''What's that?''
Anne Davies
An Iraq-style 'surge' - or another Vietnam?
Afghanistan is not another Vietnam, President Barack Obama declared just a few minutes after announcing that the US would send another 30,000 troops.
Paola Totaro
Sanity saved and all thanks to Facebook
The social networking site cops some flak, but for me it's heaven-sent.
Paul Daley
Abbott goes on an agenda bender
He may not get the credit come election time but the Opposition Leader is forcing the government's hand by setting the policy pace.
Andrew Frost
Cultural ganglands alive and kicking
What's wrong with the young people of today? They have too much time on their hands. Things are too easy. No one is interested in creating culture. And they're ignorant of history. Blame Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia.
Tony Wright
Chemistry lacking in climate-change debate
What if they called a climate-change conference and nobody from the government came? One minister responsible for Australia's environment had a prior engagement three-quarters of a year ahead; the other wouldn't decide until it was too late to slot her into the program.
Andrew Darby
Outfoxing the foxes: A pesky question
Australia's most destructive feral predator, the fox, first stepped aboard the country's marsupial ark, Tasmania, in 1998.
Kenneth Davidson
We can't blame Garrett for batts bungle
Readers of this column will have noted that I rarely have a kind word to say about the Rudd government, and I have never had a positive word for Peter Garrett. Nobody should be surprised that Garrett was compromised from day one in his environment portfolio.
Tim Colebatch
Lessons of success from societies' oppressed minorities
Back when Indonesian presidents were dictators, not democrats, Soeharto banned four issues from public discussion: differences of ethnicity, religion, race and class. In Indonesia, ''race'' meant the Chinese.
Danny Katz
The social skill of meal-praising
It's time people learnt how to practise the fundamental social skill of meal-praising.
Cosima Marriner
Bligh hoping past stumbles are a distant memory
It's been 10 months since the last election but the Liberal National Party has yet to produce any policies, content to simply score easy political points in Bligh's annus horribilis. But Bligh's fortunes are likely to hinge on how the Queensland economy performs this year.
Melissa Fyfe
Five go campaigning
It's a hard job, but some members of the opposition front bench are performing better than others. Out of the spotlight, even talented MPs can be lazy, resigning themselves to parliamentary perks. Others grab the opportunities of not being in power.
Chris Berg
Schools should be free to teach what they want
Most people seem to have missed the point about the national curriculum. The opposition certainly has. If the national curriculum is as bad as Nationals senator Ron Boswell says — it ''reads like a Marxist learner … to prepare our young for the anti-capitalist class struggle'' — in a way, that's the (decidedly not Marxist) Howard government's fault.
Lindy Edwards
The self-proclaimed heir can't recapture Howard's appeal
Tony Abbott looks to have made his version of John McCain's "Sarah Palin blunder", but that is not his greatest challenge as he endeavours to create a new conservative party. McCain made a fatal blunder in the US presidential election when he appointed Palin as his running mate. At first blush the decision was heralded as a strategic masterstroke as she could energise the party's base.
Charles Waterstreet
The writing on the kitchen wall
Even Germaine Greer would not dare to say that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott does not have balls. The proof is all over his chest, his boxing career and in his three daughters.
Geoff Strong
Too long the villain, nuclear industry needs to put some energy into PR
What has gone so wrong that it's the byword for evil in popular culture?
Elizabeth Farrelly
Black dog bites when happiness is an entitlement
I have a black dog. I mean, I get depressed, sure, as sentient creatures will, and Jeff Kennett too. But I also have a black dog.
Richard Ackland
Have a stickybeak at the Crow-eaters
So many good ideas flow out of the tiny state of South Australia it's a wonder the world isn't paying closer attention. The latest offering from the Premier, Mike Rann, is another criminal justice reform.
Lisa Carty
We need a rational debate on MPs' pay
It's a tough job but someone has to do it, so maybe politicians' salaries should reflect that.
Josh Gordon
Abbott Show needs less clowning, more action
The Opposition Leader is good at getting attention, but that may not be enough.
Tanveer Ahmed
Relics of another era: The winter Olympics and the mardi gras
It is appropriate that the winter Olympics and the mardi gras concluded at the weekend. They are both increasingly irrelevant in a world that is markedly different from the time of their origins.
Hamish McDonald
What Indonesia can teach Burma
An intriguing sidebar to the story of the Indonesian president's visit to Australia this week has been the additional insight into Jakarta's role in trying to solve South-East Asia's biggest problem: the brutal grip of Burma's military regime.
Jason Koutsoukis
Unneighbourly neighbour spooks a region
During a visit to the Persian Gulf this week to drum up support for harsher sanctions against Iran, Hillary Clinton outlined three options facing the Arab states.
Jim Schembri
Pray that Kryptonite is Avatar's undoing
Come Oscar night on Monday, uber-director James Cameron and his top-grossing, tree-hugging, 3D sci-fi digital extravaganza Avatar will pick up a swag of doorstops for best visual effects, cinematography, sound, etc. As it should.
Adele Horin
Let's not throw Abbott's baby leave out with the bathwater
Big business is on the rampage over Tony Abbott's paid parental leave plan and the Opposition Leader has come in for a terrible savaging. Anyone inclined to regard him as flaky has seized on his announcement with unfeigned glee: now he's really made an idiot of himself.
George Williams
No death penalty, no shades of grey
The Death Penalty Abolition Bill, debated in Federal Parliament last week, is the most important initiative on the death penalty for decades. If passed, it will block any state attempt to bring back capital punishment. If it did, the law would be a clear and principled statement that Australia renounces the death penalty now and into the future.
Richard Glover
It's what I know now ... and wish I'd known then
He won't read them. Not yet anyway. But here are my best bits of advice for my son on the occasion of his 18th birthday. It's what I know now ... and wish I'd known then.
Gerard Henderson
Abbott proves he really does have people skills
Not long ago, the words ''people skills'' were used about Tony Abbott mockingly, especially among journalists and political commentators. Abbott claimed to possess people skills when he thought about running for the Liberal Party leadership after the Coalition's defeat in 2007. Few took the description seriously and it was soon used by Abbott's critics to highlight a lack of self-awareness.
Lisa Pryor
How the sloppy denim brigades have come to menace the parades
Finally the city's two big parades have something in common: the fight against absorption into the sloppy denim mainstream. After the Mardi Gras, Andrew Creagh, editor of the gay men's magazine DNA, blogged about the dreariness of the parade this year.
Peter Costello
Federal-run health another batty idea
The death of four young men and insulation fires in 94 houses have focused attention on the competence of Peter Garrett to be a federal minister. But leaving aside his maladministration, the truth is the insulation program should never have been set up in the first place. Someone a lot more senior and a lot more sensible than Garrett should have stopped it.
Heckler
Son of a gun: Uncle Sam turns nasty
I harboured an irrational disapproval towards most things American during the ''Dubya'' presidency.
