Prime Minister

2023 - 1 - 3

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Image courtesy of "Al Arabiya English"

Poland's conservative prime minister comes out in favor of death ... (Al Arabiya English)

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has surprisingly spoken in favor of the death penalty and admitted he doesn't share the view of the Roman Catholic.

Poland abolished the death penalty in 1997, as it was shedding some communist-era regulations and preparing to join the EU. “In my opinion, the death penalty should be admissible for the heaviest crimes,” Morawiecki said, stressing that “I do not agree on the matter with the teaching of the church, because I am a supporter of the death penalty.” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has surprisingly spoken in favor of the death penalty and admitted he doesn’t share the view of the Roman Catholic Church on the matter.

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Image courtesy of "ABC News"

Five Australian prime ministers you may not know much about (ABC News)

Edmund Barton, 1901-03 · George Reid, 1904-05 · Joseph Cook, 1913-14 · Stanley Melbourne Bruce, 1923-29 · Arthur Fadden, 1941 · Australia and its forgettables.

The patrician Bruce was judged " [too aloof and reserved to be an Australian](https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bruce-stanley-melbourne-5400)". [[s]olemn and humourless](https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cook-sir-joseph-5763)". The sole Country Party leader to become prime minister on a non-caretaker basis, Fadden was one of a small handful of men to lead the nation in a global war. In the early 1930s, conservatives once again reorganised in the form of the United Australia Party, and dominated politics for the ensuing decade. In 1923, as leader of the non-Labor forces (now reconstituted as the Nationalist Party), Bruce formed government with Earle Page's Country Party (forerunner of today's rural National Party). In 1913, Cook led the new Commonwealth Liberal Party to a federal election, winning by the narrowest of margins. Bruce's government was ambitious for Australia in the "roaring ‘20s". Out of office, Reid and his Free Trade colleague Joseph Cook played a crucial role in making the two-party system that endures today. But Reid's attempts to settle the tariff question with Deakin's Protectionists failed, and his ministry was defeated in parliament in July 1905. Australia's first prime minister (known to detractors as Tosspot Toby) helped to establish the machinery of federal government out of nothing. Barton and Deakin's deeply racial vision of a White Australia was also enacted in legislation in these years. The idea of a "forgotten prime minister" may seem laughable.

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