Tag: Australia

Friends You Can’t Depend On

If the United States, United Kingdom and Russia risk nuclear war over Ukraine and a gas pipeline, that is bad enough; for Australia to join this insanity is worse.

What Are the Submarines Really For?

The decision to acquire nuclear-powered boats reflects what has been the Australian Way of War for more than a century: to operate inside the strategy of a superpower by contributing a well-chosen, niche capability to augment the larger force.

Australia’s Unfinished Timor Business

The following years of Indonesian occupation and violent subjection of the Timorese people were accompanied by a narrative of denial by the Australian government, aimed at protecting the Suharto regime from scrutiny and allowing the regime to continue its repression of East Timor largely unimpeded.

The Dismissal: The Beginning of the Era of Total Surveillance

The Kerr–Palace letters have turned attention back to the role of the Queen and British power in the sacking of the Whitlam government. But the dismissal was really the beginning of a new type of US power, linked to total surveillance, with Sir John Kerr as its willing accomplice.

Will the Australian project end as it began?

The counter-narrative would be that it is we, not China, that are isolated in the region: white, settler, a firm US ally, happy to support a US- and Europe-dominated world order at the UN, and to give no real recognition to the narrative that joins billions of East Asians together: that for a century or so they were dominated, exploited and humiliated by white imperial powers, and that they are now on the way to…

Defence After the Pandemic

…we have to face the fact that the United States is in serious decline. It is powerful militarily, in the technical sense, but socially it is falling apart. What future is there for an empire-dependent outlier community in this circumstance?

Constructing Melbourne’s COVID Pariahs

The latest spike of cases in the west and north of Melbourne allows the rest of Melbourne to construct COVID as a disease of migrants and the irresponsible casual workforce…

A Tale of Two Outbreaks

Siblings Leanne and Pailey Wang reflect on the coronavirus outbreak as witnessed from different sides of the globe.

Les Murray: Not an Encomium, by Stefano de Pieri

This is about Les Murray as I knew him. It is not an encomium but a story about how I came to know him—if you can ever know someone like him. Stephen Edgar, in a poem entitled ‘The Grand Hotel’—an analogy or disguise for Les’s mind—writes: Apart from that, though, I recall Something you said […]

The National Cruelty, by Russell Marks

How to understand our attitude to refugees and detention regimes

Power Assymetries and Australian Hubris

7 Jan 2014

Indonesia, Australia and Edward Snowden By Richard Tanter