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 […]
19 Oct
My article from Monday’s Crikey. The scary part was finding out that patients in other states have even more limited rights to automatic review of detention. When I was a junior doctor in Queensland I was turned off psychiatry training in part because of the non-existent external review processes for detained patients… and back then […]
16 Oct
In March 2009 I was the lead NSW delegate to the Australian Greens’ National Council in Perth when I experienced a curious fact of climate politics. Our state party put a proposal that the Senators pull back from having emissions trading as the key plank of climate policy, a position Christine Milne had enshrined in […]
28 Sep
On holiday last week I read the latest book by French philosopher Alain Badiou available in English, The Communist Hypothesis. Fittingly for the former Maoist, his book was smaller than your average paperback, bound in a red cloth cover and embossed with a gold star. Badiou is one of the few French thinkers of his […]
24 Sep
Comments Off on wrong+arithmetic: Jacques Rancière
A friend and fellow blogger at wrong+arithmetic has translated recent comments from French philosopher Jacques Rancière, regarding the expulsion of Roma in France. Given the use of racism for political gain here, the translation of the comments is timely. It is worth taking a look.
28 Aug
Lest people thought that the pre-election red-baiting of the Greens would stop now that the party’s vote had risen to 11.5 percent and they had gained four new Senators as well as a lower house MP, it has not taken long for a new round of attacks to start. While the media have joined the […]
24 Aug
Saturday’s result can be viewed as a great exercise in democracy — or a poor second-best outcome. The independents now crucial to who forms Australia’s government would tell you it’s the former. Commonsense leans to the latter interpretation. —Michelle Grattan, 24 August 2010 As one might expect, the lack of a clear winner in Saturday’s […]
11 Dec
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