Dutton’s Liberal Party

Shortly after Barack Obama’s second inauguration in early 2013, then Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal delivered a speech suggesting that unless the Republican party recalibrated its message and approach, the party would remain all but unelectable. Republicans, he said, should stop looking backwards, compete for every vote and – famously – ‘stop being the stupid party’. It’s a speech partially remembered for its brutal honesty, but more noted in retrospect because instead the Republican party chose to do the precise opposite….

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Radio crackled before dawn. Orders they’d been waiting for. Time to go, time to get that massive machine to motion, all the guns and the bullets, the bombs, grenades, the armoured vehicles and tanks. And all those young men in uniform, drawn from distant provinces and the poorest neighbourhoods of Moscow, all nerve and sinew, hoping to make mum proud. To find a way through this life. Some perhaps harbouring some misplaced sense of patriotism, long since betrayed by the…

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As parliament closes out 2021, Scott Morrison’s government is taking steps to set the agenda for next year’s federal election. Morrison will be hoping for no major bushfires this summer and a return to pre-Covid normality, so the battle can be fought around perceived LNP strengths such as the economy, national security and culture war issues like social media trolling. To that end, Morrison continues to champion the reopening of international borders and an end to lockdowns and travel restrictions…

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