Anonymity is a funny thing. ‘The one barrier me and my buddies have regarding beating the shit out of you is your anonymity,’ an anonymous critic once informed me. I declined to provide the angry Aryan with my personal details, but his message, and many more like it, reinforced the idea that giving the general public – and hence neo-Nazis – my name and address would probably not be a good move.
‘Thank heavens the political children who wanted us all to be in their image have been voted out of office. At last some adults are running the show again.’ That was Amanda Vanstone in September 2013 but it could have been any conservative commentator over the last two years, a period in which generationalism has been ubiquitous on the Right.
I can’t remember being as excited about a TV show as I have been about Redfern Now. Not since I was a kid and only allowed thirty minutes of TV a day by my overbearing grandmother. A scarcity of good things tends to make me more excited about them when they eventually happen – and there is certainly a scarcity of Indigenous bodies and stories on Australian screens.
I set out to write about Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, a new book by Melbourne University academic Professor Sheila Jeffreys, in which she contends that ‘transgenderism’ is based upon sex stereotyping, is a setback for feminism, and harmful to society and trans people themselves. I find I have little to say in response to Jeffrey’s arguments because all of them are based on the idea that women are not really women if they are trans.
Perhaps the biggest winner in the recent federal budget was Clive Palmer. The billionaire seems to be the sole agent able to tap in to the popular opposition to a budget maligned not only by the communities hit by cuts, but also by the technocrats and business lobbies that the Coalition might have relied on for support. As flawed economically and politically as this budget has been, it would be a mistake to assume that the space Palmer has managed to occupy was created by this government alone.