Archive: Arena Quarterly #11

Credibility Gulf: Theatrical strategies to wake up the narcoticised viewer

Living as we do in the grip of the mind-numbing spin of the 24-hour news cycle, one horror event after another desensitising us, what happens to our memory, our sensitivity, our political engagement?

Degrowth, Green Growth, Post-Growth?

These key questions about the imagination and creation, financing, and governance of prosperous and resilient post-carbon communities are, as the authors of these five books forcefully argue, also vital starting points for the work required to strengthen support for reduced consumption and for post-growth ways of life.

Zero Gravity: Floating towards posthumanism

The transition to the posthuman will not turn on any Judgment Day scenario, but will be a slow and incremental process of quantity turning into quality.

Vision Mātauranga: Commodifying Māori knowledge

Clearly, the government ... needed a new paradigm, one that placed Māori research under its control and oriented it towards its own policy goals, disguised albeit as in the ‘interests of the nation as a whole’.

Too Big To Tax: North West Shelf and lessons for sharing in our sovereign wealth

For as long as fossil fuels are being extracted, the Australian people should receive an equitable share of the profits from the sale of non-renewable natural resources. This will help them to adapt to climate change and manage the transition to a renewable economy.

Threats and Conflict in the Middle East

Israel’s status as a nuclear state means that the threat of nuclear proliferation is constant.

The Burtons and Bandung

If Australia’s opportunity to join the non-aligned nations faltered with the ANZUS Treaty in 1952, it died at Bandung.

A Positive Politics: Community independents and the new wave of political engagement

Politicians and parties targeting the community independents will do so at their peril, for they will also be attacking the communities that have chosen and supported them into parliament.

Reading the Republic Movement

As an act of hermeneutics, glossing the ARM’s case for a republic is on the order of interpreting Heidegger. It is higher criticism...I am treating this issue with the degree of levity it deserves.

Our Given Body: Roe v Wade

In the American context, abortion has only increasingly become a ‘master category’, pointing to an ultimate value around ‘life’ but also condensing the meanings and anxieties that are fuelling the radical Right’s larger political struggle—offering ordinary folks a visceral connection to overcoming something ‘rotten’ in the established liberal system.

Assange in Extremis: The Atlantic powers are determined on extradition

Should Assange find himself shackled in the less than salubrious surrounds of the US carceral system, he will face one of the country’s most vicious statutes. The Espionage Act of 1917, also known as 18 USC 793, has worried the US legal profession for decades.