Tag: Australian Politics

Politicians Manipulate Anzac

Anzac has become a militaristic prop, a promotions exercise for arms manufacturers and the publicity for war.

AUKUS, Nuclear Technology and Australia’s Future

To survive in this region Australia has to change its spots profoundly. It needs a form of cultural re-generation, in significant combination with its First Peoples, to justify its presence outside of the strategies of colonial power.

In the Pink

Dunstan had led the way with clothes reform in parliament, first with safari suits and then by appearing with neither coat nor tie.

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.

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.

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

Hard-Wired for Corruption: Arms Trading and Australia’s Lax Monitoring Regimes

There is little dispute among long-term arms industry researchers that it is the most corrupt industry on the planet.

Ambivalence about Albanese: A Reality Check on the Election

If ‘progressive politics’ cannot overcome growth fetishism and the cold logic of profit-maximisation, then we won’t survive progress in any desirable form.

Labor Legacies: What can we expect from an Albanese government?

Intergenerational theft is now so embedded in Australia’s policy architecture that young people will need a lot of cultivation.

Quarterly Editorial #10: The Election and the Glue that Binds

But nothing in the Labor Party vision speaks to the meaning of the combined crises that reach across personal life, economy, culture and environment, not to mention international borders. Each is a silo for policy.

‘Not a Politician’s Politician’: Remembering Moss Cass

Dr Moss Cass (1927–2022), former Labor politician and minister in the Whitlam government, was farewelled at a State Memorial last Monday. Flags atop government buildings were set at half-mast, and past and present Labor MPs, state and federal, as well as present and former leaders of the Greens, all came along. As did former treasurer […]