Progressive culture since 1954
New official statistics confirm that the alleged Victorian crime wave – an outbreak of criminality supposedly so intense that, at one stage, Liberal MP Craig Kelly wanted road signs on the border warning travellers from New South Wales about the danger they faced – never existed.
On the contrary, Victoria’s safer than at any time in the past ten years, in line with a general decline in crime across the nation.
For some sections of the radical and not-so-radical left, the idea of universal basic income (UBI) is the new utopian program. A UBI is a periodic minimum income guaranteed to all citizens, regardless of their employment, wealth, or domestic status. In other words, it’s a no-strings-attached state wealth transfer, a price-tagged right for precariat and tech billionaire alike. But there’s a reason why UBI has proponents among the libertarian right.
Reading ‘nonfiction’ can be like staring into a dark hole dug in the side of reality with just a penlight. The writer has excavated reality’s detail and arranged it neatly into words for our examination. Reading fiction, on the other hand, can be like staring at the stars for signs of the future: luminous and beautiful but not particularly illuminating, unless you’re an astronomer.
Last December, Joyce Carol Oates stoked yet another Twitter controversy when she suggested that diverse writers quit complaining about representation and simply get on with the job – starting their own publishing houses being one of her recommendations. And when I read this alongside a number of friends’ annual ‘best of’ reading lists that defiantly featured only writers of colour, I got the sense of antagonistic sides that were irreconcilable.
When HBO broke the news that they would not be releasing the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones until 2019, it was left up to an unlikely Channel Seven to fill the void. Bronzed warriors and bitter foes, sweltering battles and unexpected kill-offs, cross-promotional endorsements to rival the most stomach-churning brother-on-sister incest scenes: it pleases me to say that after a fortnight of near round-the-clock drama, Game of Racquets (or, the ‘Australian Open’ to those purists who get their knickers in knot over the whole A Song of Ice and Fire thing) has re-established itself as the best binge-watch on TV.
Rezoning decisions are easy money if you have the right connections.
A rezoning windfall profits tax, a form of betterment tax, would ensure the uplift in property values from government zoning decisions be diverted towards services and infrastructure, which would in turn benefit every Victorian.
Earlier this week, Caroline Overington published an opinion piece with The Australian. Within it, she criticised the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for hosting an exhibition in Malaysia and Indonesia, titled ‘Faith, Fashion, Fusion: Muslim Women’s Style in Australia’. ‘When did this become something the Australian government wanted to promote, and celebrate?’ Overington raises a pertinent question.
Messages on sexual health almost invariably focus on sex rather than health. Increases in diagnoses are explained as driven by changes in sexual behaviour, and calls are made for individuals to make better choices around sex. But this obscures the reality that STI rates are predominantly driven by testing frequency and access to convenient, non-judgmental sexual healthcare.
I first read this poem, which prefaces Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy story A Wizard of Earthsea, when I was twelve years old. As with all her writing it has stayed with me for my whole life, gaining depth, translucency and wisdom. And now, after hearing of her death, I’m reading it again, with a new dimension of sorrow and joy.
It helps and it doesn’t help. Her flight remains vivid, but now the sky is empty.
On 21 December 2017, I was having a few drinks at the office Christmas party at a Docklands bar. The venue lies opposite a stadium whose old name is forgotten every few years, depending on which bunch of corporate executives are prepared to pay the most for naming rights. On any given Friday afternoon, the bar is full of cheap suits, overpriced drinks and office workers ritually forgetting another working week in their lives.
The Liberal Party’s Labor-union attacks are focused on further reinforcing the narrative that ordinary people have lost control. When it comes to pro-worker legislation, the Liberal Opposition will say the usual words and take their normal positions but they will not keep at it as a persistent talking point. Instead, Guy has focused in on the relationship between the leadership of the United Firefighters Union (UFU) and the Premier.
‘Bella Ciao’ is both the most popular and the least political of all partisan anthems. It has a jaunty, upbeat tune and a very simple plot: the first-person singer wakes up one morning to discover that the country has been invaded. He wishes to join the partisans, for he doesn’t fear death. Should he in fact die, he only asks that he be buried by the shadow of a nice flower.
When Lorde responded – to them and countless others who contacted her – by cancelling, there was a predictably uproarious response from some quarters. It’s difficult to be reminded that you stand outside the human rights mainstream, which almost universally condemns Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. It’s difficult to be reminded that, as a Zionist, the society you support is one that is fundamentally based on the violent appropriation of Palestinian land and life.
When my body was giving up, my spirit completely broken and, for the first time ever, my will to live ebbing away, love buoyed me until I was strong enough to fight again. Most of that love came from queers; that is what we do well, we queers – love. We know what it is to exist on the outside, how it feels to be marginalised, what we need to do to support each other so that our suffering is less and our joy more. I feel so lucky to be a part of such an incredible community.
But this doesn’t mean I can’t hold up the mirror occasionally and say, this is not good enough. We’re not doing enough.
My pilgrimage to Milton’s cottage began with my first experience of Paradise Lost. I say ‘experience’ because my initial exposure to the poem wasn’t in print, but rather through an audio book. I listened to it – all 10,000 lines of verse – in my car driving to and from work. Milton, I like to think, let me come to him.