Here is an edited transcript of the speech I gave at the Secure Jobs in a Green Future Conference. Thanks to the Search Foundation for inviting me along, and to the other speakers on the panel: Sally McManus, Andrew Giles, Cate Faehrmann, Nick Martin and Hall Greenland. You can now access many of the presentations […]
01 May
Cross-posted from Larvatus Prodeo. Thanks to Mark Bahnisch for convincing me to return to this subject. I have to confess that I couldn’t bring myself to watch Monday’s Four Corners on the scandal of Australia’s “offshore” asylum seeker processing regime. I’m on the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition email list and read horrifying stories from Manus […]
10 Apr
If there’s one thing the entire Australian Left agrees on right now it’s that “Thatcherism was a very bad thing”. But beyond that, it may be appropriate to ask what exactly it is that people think was a bad thing. The answer to that question rests on one’s interpretation of what exactly was going on […]
23 Feb
With a sense of crisis swirling around the government, last Friday’s post on how the ALP’s problems run much deeper than a faulty “narrative” was republished at ABC’s The Drum. Then Christine Milne announced the end of the Greens-ALP agreement, and The Drum commissioned the piece below on the Greens. Now that comments are closed at the ABC website, we’re […]
15 Feb
In a considered piece at ABC’s The Drum on Thursday, Jonathan Green highlighted a phenomenon that seems to overwhelm Australian politics — the inability of simple facts about the Gillard Government’s performance to overcome the stench of crisis hanging over it. He is correct to point out “that in assuming that the mere facts of its […]
30 Dec
Just before 2012 closes out, I’m reposting my last Overland blog of the year, which originally appeared here. In some ways it is a summing up of themes we have developed at Left Flank since we started in mid-2010; chiefly in our attempts to present not just a general ideological or theoretical approach to the […]
04 Sep
When I wrote the Overland blog entry below, it was just before Newspoll showed a big jump for the ALP to a (still disastrous) 35 percent primary and 47 percent 2PP. As usual many in the commentariat saw this brief upward blip as an excess of swallows presaging summer, replaying the familiar tropes about Gillard […]
03 Aug
Left Flank has been away on holiday, but we’re back now. Below is a repost of my response to the sickening asylum seeker “debate” that happened in late June. Since then the issue has been shifted off to an elite “expert” committee which, as The Piping Shrike has pointed out, represents the exhaustion of the […]
24 Jun
I’m reposting a recent piece I wrote for Overland Journal’s blog, in response to the debate over the contentious Enterprise Migration Agreement negotiated between the Gillard government and Gina Rinehart to allow the mining billionaire to import up to 1700 skilled workers from overseas. It was written as an open letter to Paul Howes after […]
08 May
Today, I’ll be reviewing George Megalogenis’ book, The Australian Moment, for you*. It is notable for two things. Firstly, it is hymn to Australia’s class war from above reform era of the 1980s and 90s — but tinged also with regret that since about 1993 the political class has lost the will to fight the good […]
09 Jun
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