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 […]
17 Aug
In the last week the Australian Greens have played an important role in denying the illusion of consensus over the asylum policy “compromise” reached between the major parties. However, in recent years they have also increasingly adapted their economic policies to neoliberal orthodoxy. The Tasmanian Greens have led the charge, with leader Nick McKim becoming […]
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 […]
17 Apr
Bloody Bob Brown. I have a relatively quiet weekend planned and he goes and retires. Here’s the other article I was asked to write on the subject, for yesterday’s The Drum Opinion, looking at things in terms of the prospects for the party itself. I reproduce it below for your commenting pleasure away from the, […]
14 Apr
Cross-posted at the Left Flank blog at Overland Journal What does the change in leadership of the Australian Greens mean for Left politics? At one level it would be easy to write off the shift as largely irrelevant, proof that there is an essential continuity in the party’s drift into the mainstream. Given Christine Milne’s […]
26 Mar
When watching the last few episodes of US cable TV series The Walking Dead, it struck me that the title has a double meaning, that Sheriff Rick and the other survivors of the zombie apocalypse are also among the dead who roam the planet’s surface. They’re still animated to do all the usual human things […]
10 Feb
Comments Off on Is this what democracy looks like? The NSW Greens & the campaign against the BDS
The latest issue of The Monthly and my response in The Drum on Monday (here, reposted at Left Flank here) have stirred public interest in the sharpened political debates about the future of the Greens. On Thursday, The Australian ran a curiously subdued feature on the party by Christian Kerr that also pulled a lengthy quote the Drum essay. One area that deserves more […]
06 Feb
Comments Off on The Greens at the crossroads: ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ matter more than you’d think
‘Factional rifts, personal animosities and turf wars’ My latest article on ABC’s The Drum, looking at the politics and ideology behind the growing tensions in the Australian Greens, and why these debates matter. In the last decade there has been a dramatic reconfiguration on the Left of Australian politics. The ALP’s support has dropped to […]
27 Nov
Comments Off on The Greens & Palestine: confronting inconvenient truths of the party’s right of return policy
Guest post by TONY HARRIS — cross-posted from his blog, Watermelon. In March last year, 35 prominent Jewish Australians signed a petition renouncing their automatic right of return to Israel, labelling such a right a “racist privilege” while Palestinians, ethnically cleansed from Israel in 1948, are denied their rights of return under international law.
30 Dec
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