Politics
The United States is entering an important phase. By this time next year, with most presidential candidates declared, we will know whether the republic is post-Trump and returning to ‘normalcy’ or approaching peak-Trump and moving toward some sort of civil discord. I predict the former. The midterm elections in November 2022 revealed a nation grasping for the centre. The extremes of left and right did poorly. I expect this trend to continue through November 2024. So, for centrists, some New Year reasons to be cheerful.
... (read more)Bulldozed: Scott Morrison's Fall and Anthony Albanese's Rise by Niki Savva
With protests by members of the Iranian diaspora burgeoning across Europe and the rest of the world, I attend a demonstration in central Athens. A group assembles in front of the Greek Parliament, with two banners outstretched. The first reads ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, the second, ‘the Iranian people no longer want the Islamic Republic’. The mise en scène seems to capture the genealogy of a movement that began with the death of a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (or Mahsa) Amini, on 16 September in Tehran following her arrest by the notorious morality police, and has since grown into what has been deemed the biggest domestic threat yet to the existence of the Islamic regime.
... (read more)The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by Gabriel Debenedetti
The Successor: The high-stakes life of Lachlan Murdoch by Paddy Manning
The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist diplomacy in the interwar years by James Cotton
European Vision and the South Pacific, Third Edition by Bernard Smith
The Great Experiment: How to make diverse democracies work by Yascha Mounk
Subimperial Power: Australia in the international arena by Clinton Fernandes
The National Anti-Corruption Bill 2022 was introduced into parliament by the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus KC, on 28 September 2022. After the second reading speech, the NACC Bill was sent for consideration to a Joint Select Committee, which duly completed its report in time to enable the Bill to be considered for enactment in November.
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