Diversity and Empire, by Guy Rundle
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With Trump setting the agenda, Clinton retools ‘diversity’
The National Cruelty, by Russell Marks
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How to understand our attitude to refugees and detention regimes
Brexit and After
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While many commentators have expressed relief that the financial dust has settled after the decision of UK voters to withdraw from the EU, there is reason to think they relax too soon. Certainly in terms of immediate effects the political shockwaves in the UK are catastrophic and any ‘solution’ for either of the main parties is likely to have a medium (and probably longer) term unraveling effect. On the one hand there is a basic loss of trust within each party, and on the other the implicit perspective that held together general political strategy — a shared sense of positive development, of what is a desirable future — has been punctured. The two orientations reinforce each other.
Bumbling Boris the Confidence Trickster?
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Where EU leaders have got it wrong is that Brexit is less a crisis for Britain (though it is that), than the latest manifestation of a deep-seated European malady. A sense of the risk of the EU unravelling is alive in the air in Germany and France because the fear is that Brexit has launched a dangerous dynamic of EU disintegration that, if uncontrolled, may, like Brexit itself, prove unstoppable. Perhaps this is something of which David Cameron, but also Boris “Opt-Out” Johnson, are painfully aware.
Malcolm Turnbull and the Australian Nation
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What Australia currently lacks is a political party or movement that could bring about a renewal of our nation that is based upon the people whose everyday realities are grounded here. At this stage, such a development needs writers, thinkers, activists and publications to tell the story.
Auditing Indigenous Poverty
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A major challenge all political parties face is that Indigenous poverty is deeply embedded and structural and will take a long time, innovative policy and major investments to address. The diversity of Indigenous circumstances means that a diversity of approaches will be required, but the major parties are committed to mainstreaming or normalisation options. It is only the Greens that are serious about the recognition of difference and the need for approaches that emphasise social justice.
No Poetry After the Arts Council? Quadrant’s Funding Cut
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After being funded by the CIA, having received over a million dollars in Government subsidies, Quadrant magazine has sustained collateral damage from George Brandis’ cuts to Australia Council funding. It didn’t take long for editor Keith Windschuttle to blame someone, predictably ‘the left [which] remains in control of the arts’. Instead of identifying enemies, Windschuttle might examine the market and its effect on the culture he seeks to defend. Now the Australia Council has thrown his publication fully into this very mechanism, there’s no time like the present.
The Brazilian Crisis: The Conflict of Past and Future in Brazil’s Current Crisis
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As our popular political saying teaches us, ‘in Brazil even the past is uncertain’. Fiction and reality, magical realism, political pain and social hope. I have no doubts that I have returned home.
A Question for Nick Xenophon
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Senator Xenophon says the two-party system is so suffocating that politicians don’t do what they believe is the right thing. The Nick Xenophon Team, however, will be about centrist choices because according to Xenophon the choice shouldn’t be between Right and Left but between right and wrong. This sounds good, but how will NXT avoid the suffocating effect on its parliamentary members and what will count as right and wrong? What, politically, is its ‘big picture’ for Australia?