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Clive Hamilton

Sometime in 2017, one of the world’s largest academic publishers started quietly removing thousands of articles from its websites in China because they covered topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinse Communist Party (CCP). Much of the offending material related to the three Ts: Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time I was a China correspondent for the Financial Times, and an academic who was horrified by this censorship tipped me off. I contacted the publisher, Springer Nature, which admitted that it had begun censoring to comply with ‘local distribution laws’. I naïvely thought that the exposure of such craven behaviour by the owner of Nature, Scientific American, and the Palgrave Macmillan imprint would prompt a huge backlash from academics, universities, and governments.

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Lawyers, media organisations, human rights NGOs, and unions have been lining up recently to warn us of a serious threat facing civil liberties in Australia. It comes in the form of Malcolm Turnbull’s new national security laws, which, in the name of combating foreign influence, would criminalise anyone who simply ‘receives ...

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‘Forget everything you know.’ Clive Hamilton’s book pulls no punches from the first words on the cover. Building on a raft of other pieces he has written on the subject, Hamilton’s book is unsurprisingly provocative, blunt, and confident, its style matching the epic physical, intellectual, and ethical drama that is the ...

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Clive Hamilton’s meticulously researched book Requiem for a Species is to climate change what Jonathan Schell’s book The Fate of the Earth (1982) was to the nuclear menace: an advance eulogy for the human race, not for the faint-hearted. Hamilton’s predicament is captured in the opening statement: ‘sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard.’ Yet there is a solution, the author states: ‘We don’t have to take it lying down ... Only by acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity.’

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Any summary of Clive Hamilton’s contributions to public debate thus far would focus on two themes: his savage criticism of modern society and its ‘fetish for growth’; and his rejection of contemporary politics, in particular the theory and practice of social democracy. He sees the implicit faith in growth and markets, and the avoidance of a realistic analysis of power, combining to ensure that modern politics is ineffective in tackling the causes and consequences of the contemporary epidemic of unhappiness.

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It is little appreciated just how much power and influence are wielded by a successful Liberal prime minister, success being measured entirely by electoral victory. Whereas a Labor prime minister has a caucus, factions, the ACTU, a not always co-operative national executive and a sometimes fractious national conference to exert countervailing influence, a conservative leader is remarkably unfettered. The party, and indeed the government, becomes an extension of him, a mere appendage.

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