Arena Online

Inner workings: On Conspiracies

Perversely, distrust of these institutions means that when people’s intuitions appear to be rejected, or the knowledge they value undermined, it becomes a type of validation: if they say it’s false, it must be true!

I’m still Dreaming of a Black Xmas stamp

In over sixty-six years of Christmas stamps, Australia has never issued one featuring an Aboriginal artwork, let alone a Black Virgin and Christ child.

Statement Against Racism in Western Australia

Colonialism is a system of violent occupation, theft and exclusion, and systematising of this occupation through generations and into any imagined future.

Algeria’s Sexist Family Code Is Long Overdue for Reform

This Code proclaims women to be minors under the law, as it defines their existence only as daughters, mothers or wives.

The Hydra of Albion: The Monster Beneath the British Crisis

The narcissism associated with Empire permeates British society from the playing fields of Eton to the terraces of football clubs up and down England,

Where There’s Smoke … There’s Brain Damage

Climate scientists and neuroscientists are concerned, for slightly different reasons, that the risk of fires is increasing in scale, frequency and spread.

Report from Poland: Ukrainian Refugees and a Tangled History

The Polish government immediately granted temporary rights to the refugees, giving them employment, health and education support for eighteen months.

To Boldly Go: What’s in a Song?

The stunnng tone deafness of US foreign policy pronouncements across the past few decades shows no sign of slowing its descent into further depths of denial and sheer unmeaning.

The Seriousness of Britain: On the passing of the Queen

Monarchists, patriots, and Star Wars fans all relate to their respective objects of attachment in a similar way. In each case these objects become part of the individual’s identity; their self-worth is entwined with the prestige of the object.

Hope in a Tailspin: Why we need different conversations in the midst of ecological crisis

I’m edgy when writing about the limits of hope. I’ve read many accounts that more or less insist that without this emotion there is nothing but bottomless despair. I don’t buy that.

White Sculpture, White Race?

Today, neo-Nazis’s use of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture seems to be ignorant of the fact that the sculpture they are appropriating depicted the very ethnicities they hate. As most ancient sculpture was painted, those ethnicities were once plain to see.

Our new new times: Labor’s alternative to capital is capital

Talking up the country's natural heritage as the base for a 'green wall street' is the exuberance of the converted. It has deep roots in the inadequacy of Labor's socialist traditions