…while it is clear that Australians in general are more persuaded by ‘positive liberty’ arguments than the new libertarians would like to imagine, it is striking that the case for lockdown, or indeed for mandatory vaccinations, is only rarely made in those terms.
The idea that there is no significant relationship between sex and gender carries with it an assumption about human beings that should strike those on the material Left as a challenge to an idea of freedom without which ‘the Left’ as a political entity would never have come into being at all…
...it may be that the current atmosphere in Canberra represents a perverse form of unity. In arguing more and more about less and less, politicians are sending a message to the electorate that Real Disagreements are being had, when in fact it is clear that the two major parties are different cheeks on the same rear end.
…the notion that (potential) human beings—that life—can be ‘mined’ or even created in order to provide other human beings with the material they need to be healthy and happy represents a momentous shift in how we view human being itself…
The bright young things of Silicon Valley, with their dreams of direct democracy on Mars and digital immortality, are often difficult to take seriously. But their hubris is only the gaudy version of a broader cultural and political belief in the power of science and technology to edit, alter and override the very stuff from which our world is made—in other words, to ‘play God’.
The last six years of Coalition govern ment have been a period of unprecedented chaos and malignity. If the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years were The Killing Season, then the Abbott- Turnbull-Morrison years are/were The Hunger Games: a rolling spectacle of bizarre ordeals, frenzied bouts of fratricide, and cruelty raised to the level of art. Towards the end-for surely we are approaching the end-one almost expected to see the faces of toppled and departing politicians projected onto the…
In the five months since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister of Australia, one concept more than any other has dominated the political discussion: the concept of the 'centre ground'. In the mainstream press especially, the notion that politics has a 'centre' and that Turnbull has to move towards it in order to win the next election (and that he is better equipped to do so than his erratic predecessor) has attained the status of an…
