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John Button
John Button (1933–2008) was a senior minister in the Hawke and Keating governments and wrote for ABR often in his later years, also serving on the ABR Board.
Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Tyrannicide Brief, enjoys the same high public profile as those old lags who constitute the élite of Australian expatriates in London: Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Barry Humphries. In his case it is as a leading international human rights lawyer, the author of Crimes against Humanity (1999) and The Justice Game (1998), and host of the popular television s ... (read more)
This is a book for people interested in the law, politics and the institutions of public life, areas in which Sir Edward Woodward was actively involved for the last half century. It is a record of achievement and provides an interesting and clear-eyed perspective on many of the important issues of that period.
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Craig Emerson is a good man to have around in federal politics. He has ideas, which is what politics should be largely about. And ideas, in the barnyard of Canberra politics, are almost as scarce as hen’s teeth. Emerson has a PhD in Economics from ANU. In earlier times, as an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, he had a reputation for being a bit of an environmentalist. Traditionally, the two d ... (read more)
Selling books is a difficult business. Publishing, too. Booksellers and publishers need courage and imagination. A book about a contemporary Federal politician with the adjective ‘new’ in the title displays both these qualities. Tony Blair may have got away with ‘New Labour’ in Britain. In Australia, a large part of the disenchantment with politics and politicians stems from the feeling th ... (read more)
Gough Whitlam was sometimes naughty. Descending in a crowded lift from a conference attended by a number of state parliamentary delegates, he looked down on his fellow passengers and growled ‘pissant state politicians’. It was the sort of remark he liked to get off his chest. In a more deliberative mood, Whitlam, in his 1957 Chifley Memorial Lecture, wrote of state parliamentarians in the foll ... (read more)
It is usually sports fans and politicians who are uncharitably accused of being biased. The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is literally one-eyed. He was blinded in both eyes in his youth as a result of an accident playing rugby. Part of the treatment for his blindness required him to lie still in a darkened room for six months. It half worked, and he recovered his sight in one eye. Aske ... (read more)
Since the Federal Parliament moved to the house on the hill, the rose garden on the Senate side of the Old Parliament House has been neglected and uncared for. Escapism, from parliament, from Canberra, from the intensity and claustrophobia of being locked up in a remote building, has always been a secret ambition of most politicians during parliamentary sittings. The rose garden used to be a beaut ... (read more)
Selling books is a difficult business. Publishing, too. Booksellers and publishers need courage and imagination. A book about a contemporary Federal politician with the adjective ‘new’ in the title displays both these qualities. Tony Blair may have got away with ‘New Labour’ in Britain. In Australia, a large part of the disenchantment with politics and politicians stems from the feeling th ... (read more)