A Matter of Opinion

For more than two decades, from mid-1987 to the end of 2008, no one had greater access to our national parliament and its politicians than Alan Ramsey. Informed, insightful and unafraid, his Wednesday and Saturday columns in The Sydney Morning Herald were always essential reading for many thousands of Australians. Here are 150 of his unflinching views of key political events of that era, among them: the often turbulent Hawke/Keating years, the 1990 recession 'we had to have', Labor's stunning du