The Greens and Labor’s crisis

Type
Reflection
Category
Politics

The fact that labourism has been the key institution around which Australian politics pivots means that its crisis opened the potential for a political alternative to the Left of the ALP to emerge, an opportunity seized by the Greens. Saturday’s result makes clearer how the Greens’ success has rested on a dynamic tension between presenting itself as both the inheritor of an ‘old Labor’ tradition that the ALP no longer embodies, and as an anti-political alternative to the political class.

The Greens
Tompkins_square_riot_1874
Type
Article
Category
Politics

Maintain your rage

If your vote felt like it didn’t matter, it might be because it didn’t. There weren’t even two evils to choose from. I’m not saying, of course, that our avoidance of a variety of social, economic and environmental disasters wasn’t at stake. But with equal certainty, the fitness of our current political and economic model to deal with these problems was never really up for discussion – let alone the possibility that this way of doing things has in many cases created, aggravated or prolonged those very problems.

night
Type
Article
Category
Culture
Politics

The day after the night before

It’s customary, after days like Saturday, for the Left to identify the silver lining hidden in the dark cloud, to argue via, some dialectical jiggery-pokery or another, that defeat might, in a certain sense, be understood as victory. Yet, with all due respect to Joe Hill, before you can organize, you need to mourn. So, without for a moment gilding the ALP’s record, let us acknowledge what Abbott’s election means. On many issues, the difference between Labor and Liberal was merely one of emphasis but in politics emphasis is not unimportant.

molotov
Type
Fiction
Category
Writing

Harlem Jones

Harlem legs it from the job shop soon as the sour bitch pushes the button for security. Shoots like the fucken wind. She won’t call the coppers, he’s sure of it. Old cow’s just trying to give him a scare. As if he’d been serious anyway about that shit.

penguin tracks
Type
Fiction
Category
Writing

Natural selection

Everywhere Kate looked was saltbush and sea beneath a pan of impossible blue sky. She lifted her face and felt the white light fall on her and let it burn away the thought of Rosie sunk in the black hole of her room. Her parents were walking ahead, her mother somehow evanescent, her father as immutable as the geology around him.