Lenore Taylor
Lenore Taylor is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. She is a Walkley Award winner, a winner of the Paul Lyneham Award for excellence in press gallery journalism and a former foreign correspondent, based in London. She co-authored a book, "Shitstorm" on the Rudd government's response to the global economic crisis. She has covered federal politics for more than 20 years.
Labor has choked on a surplus of promises
Lenore Taylor Economists, government advisors and backbenchers have known for some time that, with growth slowing and revenue falling, keeping Labor's promise to return the budget to a skinny $1.
Lenore Taylor
Swan eats crow - and not a day too soon
Lenore Taylor ECONOMICALLY he was doing the right thing. Politically he was eating crow. Which is why it took Wayne Swan so long to do it.
Lenore Taylor
Politicians never learn, and so they keep on promising
Lenore Taylor I f politicians learn one thing from this sorry Parliament it must surely be not to make promises they can't keep.
Lenore Taylor
MPs behaving badly - a year best forgotten
Lenore Taylor The Deputy Leader of the Opposition wanted to spend this week as a starring character in an investigative drama.
Lenore Taylor
It's all well to boast but tall stories don't fit hard facts
Lenore Taylor For most people this is the season of menu planning and internet shopping, but in Canberra it's the season to road test themes for the 2013 election year.
Labor's big-ticket promises may leave Coalition in a bind
Lenore Taylor If Wayne Swan and Joe Hockey sound like they are talking about different budgets when each shouts that the other is digging a "black hole", that's because they (sort of) are.
Lenore Taylor
Scrimping and scraping is a necessary evil for balance
Lenore Taylor We got short-term budget fiddles, but also some important long-term change. The midyear forecasts show Australia's ''shift to thrift'' is starting, and for at least some of the right reasons.
Another gotcha moment for gunslinger Abbott
Lenore Taylor ON THE surface it was another political ''gotcha'' - Tony Abbott uses morning radio to lambast Julia Gillard for ''swanning'' around New York ''talking to Africans'' about her bid for a seat on the...
Lenore Taylor
Promises, promises, now it's time to do the sums
Lenore Taylor Like most things in our sorry political discourse, the debate over the alarming discrepancy between what politicians are promising to spend and the money we have to pay for it is being conducted as a...
Lenore Taylor
Lack of carnage Abbott's inconvenient fiscal truth
Lenore Taylor Perhaps Tony Abbott needs to send out a search party or post a reward because, bafflingly, his carbon tax wrecking ball appears to have gone missing.
Lenore Taylor
Electricity bills: be afraid, but not of the obvious
Lenore Taylor In every good horror movie the thing you think is going to be scary doesn't turn out to be the thing you should really fear.
Lenore Taylor
Abbott needs magic to pull surplus out of a hat
Lenore Taylor The rest of the world started 2012 transfixed by the unfolding euro zone debt crisis. In Australia, we started with some confusion about whether the last global financial crisis happened at all.
Lenore Taylor
No happy ending for this soap opera about power
Lenore Taylor The past few days in politics have been like the penultimate scene in a police drama. The main characters have finally come clean with the truth they have been withholding all this time, and the...
Lenore Taylor
Taking a Slipper to the mob at question time
Lenore Taylor I've endured many grievous challenges to my powers of concentration over the years. There was double maths on a Friday afternoon in a Brisbane classroom with a fine view of the Cloudland Ballroom,...
Lenore Taylor
Many obstacles on the road to nanny nirvana
Lenore Taylor For the first year after maternity leave both of my children were cared for by a nanny. It cost us a bomb and we couldn't get government rebates.
Lenore Taylor
Robin Hood budget will give Abbott no merriment
Lenore Taylor Trained observer that I am, I reckon the Gillard government wants this to be seen as a ''Robin Hood'' budget - designed to make a ''Labor values'' political virtue of the deep cuts necessary to...
Lenore Taylor
Tough but not politically suicidal
Lenore Taylor Oh, but Wayne Swan must hanker after the grand gestures, the lofty rhetoric, the gasp-inducing figures of the budgets of old - Paul Keating's ''bringing home the bacon'' in 1988 or Peter...
Lenore Taylor
Decision that shattered faith in PM
Lenore Taylor It was the decision that seemed to snap voters' faith in Kevin Rudd. Perhaps a final straw. Straight after the government announced it was deferring an emissions trading scheme until 2013, graphs of...
