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We might get lucky. Malcolm Turnbull might be right, and the mass of egos, grievances and interests that make up US-Sino relations might 'evolve into a new order, without either side having to make concessions to the other'. But the risks are growing. In this context the framing of asylum seekers as a threat to our sovereignty seems plain silly. War between China and the US would be a disaster to our national interests.
It might be 70 years before the new prince becomes king. Take the long view and the absurdity of an independent nation retaining a foreign monarch as its head of state is instantly apparent. But it's absurd now, too, and for the same reasons. Yet until there are political leaders who are willing to treat the republic as a matter of urgency, it will remain in the too-hard basket.
There is no denying that our nation was forged by men and women who settled here from the UK. There is also no denying that men and women from other parts of the world came after them, and that there were countless generations here before them. Until monarchists can reconcile themselves with these facts then the image they hold of Australia is incomplete.
Under the Coalition's version of the National Broadband Network, super-fast access is not lost for those who can afford the internet connectivity equivalent to a business class flight. Those who cannot however will make up the large new underclass of the digitally disadvantaged.
The voices shouting down Jones are almost certainly not those of his listeners; the people most offended by his actions, it seems, are those who have never tuned in to his show. This debacle is steeped unashamedly in politics, with the outcry reinforced by various Labor politicians and dripping with as much contempt for Abbott and his party as Jones' diatribes do for the left.
One curate in our parish claimed to dream about the royal family and believed everyone did. Any easy familiarity I had with an idealised royal family collapsed with the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Malcolm Turnbull is persuasive when he says in Australia there are now more Elizabethans than monarchists.
I'm not worried about Gillard's abysmal rating in polls. I'm not convinced anyone but journalists and backbiters have any real desire to roll her. There is no obvious alternative to Gillard as Labor leader, but there is an obvious need for a party which stands for something.
Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull's past faults and misdemeanours have been forgotten and they have been charged with new responsibilities at the heart of Australia's domestic and international futures. The new leaders must wish their vanquished colleagues great success. But not too much.
Malcolm Turnbull recently compared Kevin Rudd to the Shakespearean character Coriolanus, a reviled control freak. Politicians sometimes invoke Shakespeare to flatter their own cause. But this is fraught with dangers: they can come off sounding pompous, or their analogies may backfire.
Opposition presents the Liberal Party with a rare opportunity to recover its conservative soul and abandon Labor's vapid brand of politics. The only way forward is for the Party to replace Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott as its leader. August 2009
There is a view that Tony Abbott is seeking to expand the public's moral imagination rather than simply pander to avarice. This should be tested against his characterisation of the ETS as a giant 'tax grab'.
157-168 out of 187 results.