Politics
Bill Hayden, the first Queensland policeman to lead a federal political party, wrote of his experiences as a constable – the violence, the squalor, the tragedy – in his autobiography, Hayden (Angus & Robertson, 1996), and concluded: ‘All of these led me to feel a great anger at the injustices some people had to bear.’ At one point, the former governor-general noted that his ‘humanist’ reaction to injustice reflected his background as the son of a father who was an illegal immigrant and a mother who suffered domestic abuse.
... (read more)Personal Politics: Sexuality, gender and the remaking of citizenship in Australia by Leigh Boucher et al.
Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australia’s sovereignty by Andrew Fowler
Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth by Ingrid Robeyns
Fractured Union: Politics, sovereignty and the fight to save the United Kingdom by Michael Kenny
The Forever War: America’s unending conflict with itself by Nick Bryant
The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung
Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93) by Lech Blaine
The New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself by Peter R. Neumann, translated by David Shaw
The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.
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