Progressive culture since 1954
The 2013 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers closes on midnight, 31 August 2013. If you haven′t submitted, don′t wait until the last minute. This is Australasia’s richest prize specifically for new and emerging writers.
The real problem for the Left is that we are seeing the eclipse of a century-long era institutionalisation of politics around a rigid Right/Left axis.
When I first entered the dark satanic mills of parenthood, I spent a good deal of time stomping around shouting, ‘This job should be unionised!’ The hours are terrible, the demands unreasonable, there are numerous occupational health and safety breaches, you are always ‘on call’ and its really hard to understand what your boss wants. The pay is horrific too.
Retail politics used to mean the baby-kissing and town-hall mode of campaign time, which we can still see: witness Abbott’s awkward military boot camp squats in Darwin, or Rudd’s awkward selfies with Muslim voters in Western Sydney. But this performance feels tired and incidental to the game somehow. In politics circa 2013, retail politics also describes what happens behind the scenes as the parties subject themselves to hard analysis, not of policy but of market dynamics.
For a leftist, what hope can there be for an election? Either the ALP will win, or the Coalition will. On leftist issues, the results will be disastrous. On foreign policy, the differences are negligible. Both parties favour strong alliances with Anglo-US imperialism, their wars, puppet states and bombings. On asylum seekers, there’s been a race to find somewhere below the gutter by both major parties.