Marrickville Council may have backed off supporting the Israel BDS campaign but by highlighting the plight of the Palestinians, the Council’s initiative in this area, and the pro-BDS stance of the NSW Greens, has ensured that this will only be the beginning of the debate, not least of all within the Greens themselves. The Australian […]
11 Apr
Comments Off on Last rites for the Labor Party? Part Two: An impasse for post-materialist Greens politics
If you need any proof that the Greens did reasonably well in last month’s NSW election it would have to be the tide of opinion telling us just how badly they did. Such commentary was almost inevitably accompanied by “advice” for the party to moderate its “hard Left” policies/stick to the environment/disappear altogether. If the Greens […]
27 Mar
Comments Off on Rock-bottom redux: Last drinks rites for the Labor Party? Part One
As a party able to offer itself as a viable government, Labor is not just under existential threat. It is finished. Unless, of course, it can engineer an extraordinary resurgence. Labor’s looming death as a stand-alone political entity is the biggest story in contemporary Australian politics. —Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 2011 How […]
17 Mar
Comments Off on Guy Rundle, the ‘anti-imperialist Left’ and the calls for a no-fly zone in Libya
> Friends no longer It’s important to give Guy Rundle credit for being one of the few mainstream commentators who still has interesting things to say from a genuinely Left perspective. But his intervention in the debate over whether the Australian Left should back calls for a Western-run no-fly zone in Libya — to save […]
04 Mar
Comments Off on Drugs! Drugs! Drugs!
As the state election skulks closer, it seems clear the NSW Greens will not be actively campaigning on their Drugs and Harm Minimisation policy in the community or the media. Their silence makes obvious that they have determined to stay mum on the question, despite the policy being one democratically endorsed by the membership after […]
02 Mar
Comments Off on The Irish Greens and the decomposition of official politics
> 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 […]
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 […]
18 Dec
The horrifying deaths of refugees near Christmas Island this week produced two notable responses. The first, recycled endlessly in recent times, was the call for people to not use the tragedy to gain political advantage, a ridiculous idea given that Australia’s current refugee policy has few reasons for existing except in the service of politics. As Left Flank […]
11 Dec
What is the nature of elite rule and how can it be challenged? This is the real question behind the political crisis caused by the WikiLeaks revelations. Compared with other leaks, the scale and breadth of the information being released makes it impossible not to reassess how state and citizens interact. Despite the attempts at […]
03 May
Comments Off on Green Fear: staying out of the ‘no-go zone’ of Australia-US-Israel relations