Progressive culture since 1954
David Shearer, the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party didn’t lose his job after an electoral defeat, but a mere twenty months into his term as Leader of the Opposition. He went out with a whimper, lamenting how the job was beneath him, as if contemptuous of where ambition had led him.
As Susan Wyndham wrote in the SMH, in a piece rather inaccurately titled ‘Plagiarism the word that can’t be uttered’ (given it’s the word everybody’s using): ‘With one of the Ulrick judges, Margie Cronin, [poet Anthony] Lawrence began to Google passages from Ransom [Slattery’s winning poem]. They found about 80 per cent of the long poem was made up of 50-odd poets’ work, some of them famous, such as Americans Charles Simic and Robert Bly, and one Australian, Chris Andrews.’
When Campbell Newman won the 2012 Queensland election in a landslide that all but annihilated the ALP, one of his first policy announcements was to abolish the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. This saved a mere $244 000. Newman followed the announcement with more major cuts, ripping $20 million from the arts budget, particularly from education programs.
With the launch of the new national insurance scheme, DisabilityCare, disability is for once high on the public agenda. Many Australians now agree that the previous system failed those in need and they thus support this long-overdue reform. What is more, there is finally real money on the table, money that can help address the entrenched disadvantage experienced by people with a disability.But what will DisabilityCare really do? Or, more to the point, what will it do differently?
One of the less enjoyable things about growing older is that books blow your mind less regularly. Books that explode the possibilities of the novel are rare; when they do appear, however, it is with more lasting power. For the last six years I’ve been grabbing lapels and insisting that Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria was the Great Australian Novel. With The Swan Book, she’s done something new, again.