Recent analyses of public opinion In the United States have confirmed the significance of racial resentment for evaluations of Barack Obama. The report of the committee on the constitutional recognition of indigenous people has revived discussion of the lessons of the 1967 referendum. Unfortunately this discussion has ignored the significance of racial resentment in Australian […]
Working Class Culture
Recently read the 1979 collection of essays Working Class Culture on the British working class. A product of the famous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies it was published in the year of Thatcher’s election and recalls a lost era.
After the revolution: lessons from Latin America
What would a socialist revolution be like? Socialist Alternative has a view If socialism is not Stalinism, it is also much more than a nationalised economy and a few more publicly run services. When we argue that another world is possible, we mean a world free of the class divisions and inequality of capitalism; a […]
Bob Katter as Queensland Aboriginal Affairs Minister
Discussion of the three rural independents has given little attention to their past political records apart from them all having been once members of the National Party. Bob Katter is the only former minister. He served in the Queensland National Party governments of 1983 to 1989. These were single-party government formed after the coalition with […]
Race, history and politics
Why it is that a hostility towards indigenous Australians is a core principle for some Australian conservatives? Some light on this is shed by the history of history.
Rudd’s ‘nation-building’ and Aboriginal affairs
Writing lecture on nationalism for Modern Political Ideologies I was considering the relation between social democratic parties and the project of liberal nationalism. It is arguable that confronting a perceived Islamic fundamentalist challenge to liberal norms social democrats have moved towards a more unitary concept of national identity. An example would be Gordon Brown’s interest […]
Alison Anderson and the Maori Party
Thought I had demonstrated initiative when last year I added a discussion of the Northern Territory government to my lecture on Indigenous Self-Determination in Australian Identities: Indigenous & Multicultural. Considered it more politically interesting than ATSIC which preoccupied the Unit materials perhaps because it fits the general academic preoccupation with the Howard government. Since […]