Category: Australia
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Mad Max: Fury Road is a masterpiece of Australian cinema, that makes the rare achievement of building on its predecessors in the series to bring post-apocalyptic film-making to what must, surely, be its apotheosis. Visually stunning, with a brilliant sound-track, incredible pace, and a simple joy in hedonistic old-school road wars violence that is deeply…
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This week 700 asylum seekers drowned when their boat capsized somewhere in the Mediterranean sea; reports suggest that a large number of these poor souls were locked in the hold of the ship and had no chance of escape. A year ago the people on this ship might have been found rescued earlier by the…
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[Warning: Australian politics] I read in the newspapers yesterday that Clive Palmer, mining magnate and funder of the Palmer United Party, is going to sue two former party members for campaign financing he provided to help them get elected. Given how mercurial and weird Palmer is, the news is probably already out of date and…
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[Warning: Australian politics] Last weekend there was a State election in Australia, with popular Liberal (for overseas readers: “conservative”) premier Mike Baird up against apparently well-liked Labour (for overseas readers: “liberal”) opposition leader Luke Foley. In the context of a deeply detested federal Liberal government, and a recent crushing defeat for the Liberals in Queensland,…
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As expected, Syriza have won the Greek elections, taking a near majority and forming a government with a minority right wing populist party, and so far none of my fears have been realized (yay). As expected, Syriza’s “radical” economist Yanis Varoufakis has been selected as finance minister, putting him on a direct collision course with…
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Strange things are happening in Australian politics at the moment. The Federal government appears to be shooting itself in the foot with rocket launchers, and doing everything it can to become that rarest of entities, a one-term Federal government. There are many examples of the government’s reckless desire to consign itself to the dustbin of…
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Many years ago now I lived in Newtown, Sydney, and the areas surrounding it (Stanmore, Marrickville, etc), all of which have a recent history as the home of a large number of Aboriginal people and a bit of a hotbed of street activism (far left and far right), largely probably due to their proximity to…
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Or, perhaps to phrase the question a different way, is the era of the small political party over in modern democratic Anglosphere politics? The question occurred to me today as I read the latest reports of the implosion of Australia’s Palmer United Party, which has been in the Senate now for perhaps four months and…
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A little-remarked upon aspect of this most recent Australian federal election has been the performance of the Greens. It’s not surprising that the media don’t report on the Greens’ results, since they hate the Greens and they can’t take them seriously as a party, but it is a little disappointing that they haven’t commented on…
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It’s been a long time since Australia had a double-dissolution election, but I have a suspicion we will get this singular pleasure soon, and that it will be fought out between the major parties as a referendum on climate change. I refuse to elevate my suspicion to the level of a prediction, but I’m going…
Compromise and Conceit 