‘I just saw Gone Girl and it was one of the most offensive, flippantly sexist, arrogant, misogynistic excuses to make a film about a “crazy bitch wife who only wants babies and manipulates everything.” I am so mad, and everyone else in the world seems to love it.’
The parliament has passed legislation that permits the Attorney General to authorise certain activities of ASIO and affiliates as ‘special intelligence operations’.
A man has been tortured. Not just any man, though: an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who came to Christmas Island by boat, and spent six months in detention there before being transferred to Australia.
There has been plenty of hype over the recent changes to Australia’s national security legislation, and rightly so. But it is worth spending a moment to work out what actually is already on the books, what is new, and what’s coming.
I knew from a young age that I would work in the film industry. My mother was an extra, and before I could form sentences I was being pushed around in a pram on film sets.
Before I had a child, I gleaned subconsciously from pop mythology that motherhood was distinctly pastel.
More positively, socialist realism was centrally concerned, as a Soviet ideologue put it, with promoting ‘revolutionary romanticism’, expressing in literature ‘the very soul of the proletariat, its passion and its love’.