> Fianna Fáil waves goodbye If there is one OECD economy that can be considered a place where the logic of neoliberal shock therapy — what Naomi Klein has dubbed the “shock doctrine” — was used most brazenly to solve a crisis of neoliberalism itself, it would have to be Ireland. The result has been […]
22 Feb
Comments Off on The changing face of activism (or not)
Members of the April 6 Movement in Egypt Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa have revealed new and surprising forms of political activism and reinforced long standing ones. The mass uprising in Egypt has sparked a wave of protest across the region as populations held down for decades under oppressive regimes […]
20 Feb
Comments Off on Have the Australian Greens become Julia Gillard’s ‘useful idiots’?
Since the dust from the August election settled, something strange has been going on in the Australian Greens camp. I think it’s probably a conscious “strategy,” but I’m not privy to the discussions in the party room, so I can’t be sure. But here is my stab at it, and why it worries me deeply. […]
03 Feb
Comments Off on The Egyptian revolution: Liberal democracy as the enemy of freedom
In February 2003 I was part of the 400,000-strong rally in Sydney opposing the impending US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. It seemed for a moment that we were going to disrupt the plans of the self-styled Coalition Of The Willing by sheer force of numbers, part of probably the largest coordinated protest in Australian and world […]
23 Jan
Comments Off on Compulsory voting: More to do with legitimating state rule than democracy
It puzzles me that one can say many outrageously left-wing things on Twitter and barely get a rise but when one raises criticisms of compulsory voting (CV) many left-leaning tweeps get very worked up indeed. Sometimes more worked up than they get about things like the possibility of the Liberals winning in NSW in a […]
21 Nov
It was difficult to know how to approach Paul Howes’ Confessions Of A Faceless Man, his public “diary” of the 2010 election campaign. Was it to be a tell-all insider’s account delivering anecdotes that journalistic efforts would miss? Was it to be a re-evaluation of the problems the first-term federal government got itself into, a thoughtful […]
16 Nov
Me in today’s The Drum Unleashed on the ABC website, where I look at the collapse of the Greens’ strategy to secure Liberal Party preferences in some key inner-Melbourne seats. Just why is a Left party playing these games? Since 2006 the ALP has hammered the fact the Greens are willing to do deals with the Liberals, a line […]
26 Sep
That new paradigm thingy didn’t last long, now, did it? At least not the world of “kinder, gentler” politics that Tony Abbott was promising. Nor the ability of rural Independent MPs to rise above the fray of deal-making and remain untainted by “old-style” party politics. Nor, of course, the dream of politicians finding more “consensus” […]
14 Sep
There has been much discussion in the left-leaning blogosphere about the stridency of the Murdoch media campaign against the “legitimacy” of the Gillard minority government. As Left Flank noted on the weekend, The Australian has editorialised that it is committed to having the Greens “destroyed at the ballot box”. In the AFR on Friday (paywalled, […]
11 Sep
THE uncomfortable irony surely has not been lost on the Gillard government: the Labor Party, which is so weakened that large segments of its own electoral base are simply marching away, holds on to office only because four men who have never been part of the ALP have decided to give it a bare parliamentary […]
02 Mar
Comments Off on The Irish Greens and the decomposition of official politics