When Labor’s 2030 climate change policy, Powering Australia, was released early last December, relief by Labor supporters followed a fresh reckoning for the author – one of the ablest in Labor’s ranks, Chris Bowen, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy and Member for McMahon in Sydney’s west. In Australian politics, never has “McMahon” been linked to clever policy development.
As Independent Chair of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) to February 2022, I pined for a week like the last one.
16 July 1931 – 13 March 2022
Peter McMahon, champion of garbologists – as he proudly said, local government union leader, NSW Upper House Labor politician, industrial tribunal member, historian, and community activist, had many significant achievements, including improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees, and recruiting Paul Keating to work as a young research officer for the Municipal Employees’ Union (MEU) before the budding politician propelled himself, aged 25, into the Federal parliament in 1969.
It is achingly sad that the whip-smart, vivacious, principled, Senator Kimberley Kitching died on Thursday in Melbourne, aged 52, apparently of a sudden heart-attack.
Chris Bowen, the former Treasurer, now Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, is an avid reader, and curious about the motivation, thinking, and conflicts that rule the hearts and minds of political folk.
This book of essays continues the work of the P.M. Glynn Institute of the Australian Catholic University (ACU), whose 12 book-length, and other, publications under the Kapunda Press imprint over the past six-years encourage espousal, renewal, and debate about Catholic traditions and ideas.
This is a collection of 24 essays on jurists, politicians, and related others, who made a mark on Australian history and whose Christian faith in and/or reaction to Christian ideas made an interesting impact.
Here is a radical reassessment of 1901, the formation of Australia viewed as a less than glorious moment in Australian history. Economist, economic historian, and Australian Federation critic William Oliver Coleman argues and writes well, though leaving room for doubt about his critique and conclusions.