Opinion

By Anne Summers          Illustration by Simon Bosch You’d think it would be bleedingly obvious that if 87 per cent of the population agreed with a proposition, then our members of parliament would dutifully and faithfully reflect that view when it came to voting on legislation. We are, after all, in the middle of an election, which … Read More

By Anne Summers       Illustration by Simon Bosch It was dispiriting, to put it mildly, to hear the views on domestic violence expressed by audience and panel members on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night. The questions, and many of the responses, exhibited such woeful, and possibly wilful, ignorance about the crime of domestic violence that I … Read More

by Anne Summers      Illustration by Dionne Gain The repercussions of the deals done to push through Senate voting reforms are yet to be felt. It was in another Senate, oceans away and more than two thousand years ago that the brutal assassination of a political leader by his Senate colleagues occurred on the Ides of March. What happened … Read More

by Anne Summers    Illustration by Simon Bosch There’s every chance that Barack Obama will nominate an African-American woman to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) judge whose sudden death last weekend has thrown US politics, including the presidential election race, into a tailspin. The US President is fully aware of the highly charged politics of … Read More

By Anne Summers It’s a topsy-turvy world in American politics when the two second-place getters in Iowa are getting more attention than the winners. American politics are being transformed during the current presidential contest and it is impossible to say at present just where they will end up – let alone which of the still surviving candidates will win the … Read More