Politics
Please Explain by Anna Broinowksi & Rogue Nation by Royce Kurmelovs
More than any other political party in Australia, One Nation represents a puzzle for commentators. When trying to explain its support – which has hovered around ten per cent since its revival in 2016 – the temptation is to look for subtext, something deeper, beneath the surface. Could the party’s cultural pitch really be a code for ...
... (read more)Making Modern Australia: The Whitlam government’s 21st century agenda edited by Jenny Hocking
In his powerful eulogy for Gough Whitlam at the Sydney Town Hall in November 2014, Noel Pearson described the former prime minister – this ‘old man’ – as one of those rare people who, though he never suffered discrimination, understood the importance of protection from its malice. Pearson speculated on the apparent paradox ...
... (read more)Asylum By Boat: Origins of Australia’s refugee policy by Claire Higgins
In early October 2017, Thomas Albrecht, the Canberra-based Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), took to The Guardian to register his dismay about the Australian government’s response to asylum seekers. ‘The current policy has been an abject failure,’ he wrote. ‘A proper ...
... (read more)The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce & The Fate of the West: by Bill Emmott
Anyone who has paid any attention to the words coming out of the mouths of populist figureheads like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders will know this: populists traffic in nostalgia. For them, the best days are always our yesterdays – before the West was corrupted by the onslaught of progressive ...
... (read more)Gareth Evans is one of the more interesting figures from the Hawke–Keating governments, not alone as a high achiever in a talented team, nor in the tenacity that saw him remain so long in the inner circle, but unusual in forging a cosmopolitan career of such substance thereafter. His political memoir demonstrates the continuity ...
... (read more)Reboot: A democracy makeover to empower Australia’s voters by Richard Walsh
For the past few years, teaching at the Australian National University, I have asked first year politics students whether they would personally consider joining a political party. The question usually produces a few enthusiastic Labor activists, one or two Greens members, and the odd brave Young Liberal. Once, a student flirted with the Sex Party. But the overwhelmi ...
The End of Europe: Dictators, demagogues, and the coming Dark Age by James Kirchick
‘The obscurest epoch is today.’
Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1892)
A book that attempts to predict the course of contemporary affairs is always a dangerous enterprise. Events, political events, in particular, have a way of turning like the proverbial worm. Brexit and the election of President Trump are simply the lat ...
The Show: Another side of Santamaria’s movement by Mark Aarons and John Grenville
The Movement was a secret organisation which radically reduced the power of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) within the union movement during the 1940s and 1950s. Initiated by B.A. Santamaria, the Movement was very active in several Australian states and worked with the general knowledge and approval of key Catholic Church bishops. The Movement (or the Show) u ...
There has been an argument going on in the Liberal Party about the nature of the Menzies heritage – was Robert Menzies, the founder of the modern party, a liberal or a conservative? Notably absent from this discussion has been the national figure who was the first leader of a united anti-Labor party and who also happens to have been a father of Federation, Alfred ...
For decades, centuries, millennia, homosexuals (here as elsewhere) have been insulted, blackmailed, beaten, incarcerated, and murdered. Even now homosexuality remains one of the principal causes of suicide and despair in our society, especially among young males.
... (read more)