It is now received wisdom that the NSW branch of the ALP is responsible for everything that is wrong with Labor politics in Australia. Even smug Victorian state ministers have felt comfortable parroting this line publicly. In particular, the argument goes, the NSW Right are a bunch of unaccountable thugs who singlehandedly destroyed what should […]
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 […]
13 Oct
Comments Off on On the Twitters
I swore I’d never sign up to Twitter. “What’s the point?” I’d ask. “It’s just status updates like Facebook.” In June 2009 I found myself deciding what my Twitter username would be. What bought about this change in attitude? Well, Grods, if you must know. Scott made the announcement that Bron had signed up. She […]
08 Oct
Comments Off on Neoliberal financialisation: State intervention against the public interest
From John Quiggin’s just-released new book, Zombie Economics, this on “financial deregulation”: The term deregulation is something of a misnomer, since no system in which the public is the ultimate guarantor can be regarded as unregulated.
05 Oct
Today this tweet showed up in my feed: BernardKeane If Tony Abbott really wants to learn from the Tories he should start with their attack on middle-class welfare http://bit.ly/9vL8os It links to the fallout of a decision by the Con-Dem coalition to slash a billion pounds out of the UK’s universal child benefit, a decision […]
04 Oct
If the protests against the Pope during his recent visit to the UK prove anything it is that the Vatican has really upset people. But beyond that, the motivations behind the protests are a complex mix of righteous anger, progressive criticism and reactionary sentiment, with the boundaries between them difficult to tease out. What is […]
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 […]
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” […]
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.
23 Oct
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