Politics
August in Kabul: America’s last days in Afghanistan by Andrew Quilty
Australia at the Crossroads: Reflections of an outsider by B. A. Santamaria
Richard Downing: Economics, advocacy and social reform in Australia by Nicholas Brown
Law, Capitalism and Democracy: A sociology of Australian legal order by Pat O'Malley
The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia by Frank Cain
The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy by John N. Molony
Power and Protest: Movements for change in Australian society by Verity Burgmann
For a reform politician, these three books should be compulsory reading. They are not, for such a reader, heartening. But they do ‘serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’.
Brian Dale’s Ascent to Power, very much less than fair to Neville Wran, is an unintended expose of the nature of political journalism in this country and its practitioners.
... (read more)The federal government’s proposal for a multicultural television network has sparked off once more a row about the nature of the Australian national identity.
The opponents of the network seem to fear that it will cause all kinds of divisions in our community by emphasising the different places and cultures to which we owe our origins. They would like to restore the myth of a single nation, bounded and defended by a single shoreline (plus, of course, Tasmania), giving allegiance to a single flag and monarch and united by a single tongue. The myth is glorious in its simplicity, and marred only by the fact that it corresponds to no historical truth.
... (read more)