Imagine that Bill Leak wrote a musical in the last few years of his life. The musical was intended to satirise a pair of white, Green-voting, hippie transcendentalists who arrive in Maningrida to save the Aborigines there from their lives of welfare dependence, child abuse and neglect, and family violence (which were some of Leak's specific concerns in recent cartoons). Let's imagine that he spent months researching the foibles and quirks of white, Green-voting, hippie…
How to understand our attitude to refugees and detention regimes <br /><br /> I have a good friend whose job involves trying to change the way ordinary people think and talk about refugees and asylum seekers. Her previous job - as a caseworker for people who had recently settled in Australia as refugees and who had applied for refugee visas -had led her to conclude that the best way to help her clients was to…
A new prime minister is supposed to get a bounce in the polls. John Howard got a big one, Newspoll's cheeky 'better PM' question recording a jump from 40 (the percentage of the population who liked him better than Paul Keating) immediately before the 1996 election to 54 per cent immediately after it. Albeit, we were then comparing him with Labor's own Biggest Loser, Bomber-turned-Ambassador Beazley. Of course, Howard's bounce was nothing compared with that…
Contructing Reality through fear and hostility. From the time he became the leader of the Liberal Party in December 2009, Tony Abbott was relentless in his strategy to win back government for the Coalition. More tradition incarnations of Her Majesty's Opposition would for the most part imagine themselves as a check and balance on a government they would otherwise allow to govern according to their mandate. As Abbott himself wrote in his 2009 book, 'Battlelines',…
Managers, not workers, the dead weight on the Australian economy As the national economy sinks inexorably toward recession at the prospect of an Abbott government, Australian enterprises must work harder at becoming more efficient, more productive and more profitable. The dead weights on Australian businesses must be cut adrift or polished away. In contradiction to the many and consistent press releases from peak business groups (Business Council of Australia, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry)…
Is Australia a racist country? In progressive opinion the belief that yes, Australia is racist, is near enough to common sense. 'Racism' is the main empirical justification for the Left in its sophisticated commitment to cosmopolitanism, internationalism and localism, having rejected the progressive potential of Australian nationalism and national culture for much of the past half-century.
