The Regression and the Valkyries

Three years after COVID gave the world a first reminder as to just how many, and how blithe, assumptions our current global arrangements were based on, the eruption of an old-fashioned land war appears almost unseemly in a high-tech era.

Australia’s Sub-Sovereignty: AUKUS, ANZUS and our Subservience

Australia’s history is replete with missed opportunities for asserting sovereign independence, for peacefully relating to our region, for sustainable development and for conciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples.

Rupert Murdoch: Permanent Overlord

Murdoch’s open letter to employees is a fabulous reminder that totalitarian empires are not merely to be found in the public sphere.

PODCAST: Setting the World on Fire: the new nuclear push

An audio recording of the Arena public discussion hosted by the Institute for Postcolonial Studies (IPCS).

Settler Nationalism and Progressive Discourse

Even searching accounts of Australia’s founding can’t resist the assimilationist logic they expose.

The Unfinished Business of 1967

Treaty and Voice were being spoken of from the moment the referendum was won.

The Aukward Situation

Excuse the strain, we’ve been roundly Amerified. Our tastes, waistlines, the secular statehood of our core antagonisms; all have given up the canestalk for lashings of fructified corn.

We Have A Voice: It’s Not Listened To

I might shudder at the thought that after all that has happened to Aboriginal people, the best remedy on offer is an advisory body.

Editorial: Many Faces of Colonising Power

How will the Voice, if it comes into being, handle the further deracination of Culture in the hands of sympathetic technocrats, used as a tool itself of enlightened governance of Indigenous people and their aspirations?

Notes of an Arrernte ‘Undecided’

A Yes vote won’t change whose constitution it is, a no vote won’t take the struggle back decades....

Automating the all-about-me: On Apple’s new Mental Health App

AI that seeks recognise, interpret and simulate human emotions may or may not be a pseudo-science, but it certainly is a jostling field that should be critiqued as a commercial rhizome.

Letter from London

This is all very complicated for the Left. How might we distinguish a pacific left-wing move to end the war through negotiation from a cold-blooded Kissingerian realism.

The Great White Fleet Returns: AUKUS, culture, ‘mega-race’ and the new world blocs

The Left appears to have very little to say about AUKUS, even though it amounts to the most comprehensive imposition of hegemonic whiteness currently on offer.

‘Opening Up’ UniMelb: A Striking Master-plan

With demolition, the University of Melbourne has declared itself incapable of inheriting the memories embodied, literally as carbon and figuratively as student and staff experience, in these buildings

Maxed Out Oil vs the Eco Zealots: Sunak’s Anti-Green Campaign

Bike lanes, changes to city planning codes, emissions reduction initiatives, domestic energy policies and international climate commitments are fast becoming some of the fiercest frontlines in the upcoming election

Have You Tried Not Being poor?: Cognitive dissonance in twenty-first century social policy

It’s hard not to feel that Labor pursued a cruel strategy of using weasel words to give false hope to welfare recipients for electoral gain.