The Latest Breaking News from Alfred Deakin

Peter Dutton’s defensive posture of just appealing to "the base’" and trying to hold the Liberals together may prove the losing gambit.

Party stability on the progressive side of politics, and repeated party reconfiguration on the conservative side of politics, is a marked contrast in the history of Australia’s two-party political system.

The idea of a “forgotten prime minister” may seem laughable. For Australian historians, it is the governed rather than the governors who need rescuing “from the enormous condescension of posterity” as the English historian E. P. Thompson famously put it.

The solicitor-general’s recent finding that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s furtive accrual of ministerial portfolios “fundamentally undermined” the principles of responsible government has drawn attention to the precarity of democracy. In seeking to safeguard our democracy, we must consider the extent to which Australians’ long-standing apathy about our democratic system…