Finally John Howard has got what he deserved. This time, there was no way his government could avoid a crushing election defeat.

WHEN JOHN Howard won the 2004 election, the newspapers were gushing. Here was the leader who had tapped into the psyche of ordinary Australians, who understood them and related to them.

Campaigning by Your Rights at Work local groups swung a number of seats against Howard. Jim Nilon,
Rights at Work campaign co-ordinator in the seat of Blair in Queensland spoke to James Supple about why.

The Greens' campaign in the seat of Melbourne was a model of how to increase the party's support by breaking into Labor's working class base.

Jarvis Ryan writes that there is a contradiction at the heart of the new Labor government's approach to managing the economy.

UP TO 10,000 teachers gathered at Melbourne's Vodafone arena on November 21 to vote on the next steps in their campaign against the state government. Teachers at the mass meeting voted to reject the government's pay offer and to support an official motion for a statewide 24-hour strike on February 14 next year. They also endorsed rolling regional four-hour stoppages to follow.

RECENT POLLS suggest that the Afghanistan war is becoming as unpopular as the Iraq War. But one bizarre response on the left has been to argue that, while Australian troops should now pull out, some kind of foreign intervention was still necessary to quell the Taliban after 9/11.

Pre-election opinion polls suggest that the Green vote has either stagnated at around the 7 per cent gained in 2004, or has possibly declined a per cent or two. The exception is Tasmania, where the issue of the Gunns pulp mill has doubled the Greens vote in the past month.

One of Australia’s foremost scientific authorities on energy and the environment and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Professor Ian Lowe, has entered the debate on nuclear energy with his feature article in the latest Quarterly Essay. He spoke to Sarah Thorne.