The Prime Minister is expressing a willingness to have elements of the Australian Defence Force join with the United States in another intervention in Iraq – notwithstanding that neither the shape of that intervention nor its objective is known.

We would argue that the fact that we are considering going back into Iraq makes it all the more obvious that we need to learn the lessons from the previous invasion, the disastrous nature of which is not only almost universally acknowledged but demonstrated by the fact that some claim a need to go back in.

There should be no further …

Veteran political journalist Maximilian Walsh, commenting on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme that is all his own work and causing much angst within the Liberal Party, says in today’s Australian Financial Review (see here) that the increasingly presidential style of Australia’s leaders has changed the balance of power between the Prime Minister and the Government, allowing them to present policy to the cabinet as a fait accompli.

He is absolutely right, as we saw in the case of the decision to join in the invasion of Iraq. This is one of the many important reasons why …

In the course of reading and research for a paper I am writing in relation to the process by which Australia made the decision to participate in the Iraq War, I came upon an interesting paper by Chaim Kaufmann of Lehigh University, published in the MIT Belfer Centre’s prestigious journal International Security in 2004. It is a solid read but well repays the effort. Its central thesis is that in the case of the Iraq War, and perhaps more generally, the democratic “marketplace of ideas” failed to deal with “threat inflation” and manipulation of public opinion on the part of …