Now, some have suggested these laws are really about moralising; they are right. —Mike Baird, responding to criticism of Sydney’s lockout laws on Facebook, 9 February 2016 It was all I could do to not choke on my dinner as I watched journalists and politicians fawn over outgoing NSW Premier Mike Baird on the TV […]
18 Sep
As the Pet Shop Boys acutely observed, “love is a bourgeois construct,” so same-sex marriage (or “marriage equality”) has always seemed to me to be a bit of a double-edged sword — both the removal of one of the last legal forms of discrimination against LGBTIQ people and the integration of same-sex couples into a historically […]
15 Jun
Labor, unsurprisingly, refuses to concede any policy mandate for a Turnbull victory. Nor do the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team or most of the independents. The mandate theory, once applying to an elected government’s program, has been corrupted to mean every party and independent has a mandate against the government. This year’s policy contest may […]
17 Aug
Let’s get something clear right away — same-sex marriage has not been and will not be the kind of issue that could destroy Tony Abbott’s prime ministership. Electorally, despite overwhelming popular support for equal marriage rights, it has consistently been a lower-order issue in terms of votes. And within the party room Abbott is on the […]
01 Feb
Assert, don’t defend. Fight, fight, fight. —Andrew Bolt, “[Abbott] Government behind 46 to 54. But here’s how it can recover”, 15 December 2014 [Campbell Newman] just seemed arrogant and beyond the control of voters — a fatal flaw in Australian politics. Abbott hasn’t had Newman’s freedom to smash through as he tackles another Labor debt, […]
29 Dec
Abbott has to perform well as prime minister next year, not just to preserve his leadership and give the Coalition a chance of re-election but also to restore public faith in the political class and Australia’s system of parliamentary democracy. The year 2015 has to see a restoration of political stability in the national interest. […]
01 Nov
In the latest post at her personal blog, An Integral State, Left Flank’s ELIZABETH HUMPHRYS challenges Naomi Klein’s celebrated “shock doctrine” thesis of neoliberal transformation by looking at the Whitlam dismissal and the Fraser government’s failure to drive through neoliberal reform. But despite these concurrent ‘shocks’ — the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression […]
14 Sep
![[Graphic: Newcastle Herald]](http://web.archive.org./web/20170318014549im_/http://left-flank.org/files/2014/09/Liberals-ICAC-156x156.jpg)
It’s been enjoyable indeed to watch the humiliation of both sides of NSW politics on the ICAC witness stand. But, unlike Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald — or the Greens, who have been pushing the idea for some time — I don’t think a federal ICAC would either solve the problem of “political […]
08 Sep
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Left Flank’s ELIZABETH HUMPHRYS has launched a new website for her own work, An Integral State: Notes on Marx & Gramsci. The latest post is her paper from the roundtable on Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin’s Deutscher Prize winning book The Making of Global Capitalism, at the Historical Materialism Australasia conference last weekend in Sydney. […]
15 Jul
In New Matilda today I have a major piece rebutting the dominant Left explanation for Australia’s brutal asylum seeker policies: That such policies are “poll-driven” in that voter attitudes on the issue are enough to swing elections. It is mainly a response to two NM articles last week written by their main political writer, Ben […]
19 Jan
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