Month: October 2015

  • Review: The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott

    ‘Events, dear boy, events,’ British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied when asked what was most likely to blow his government off course. What goes for politicians goes for writers too, as I discovered for myself on 14 September, when Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. At that time I…

  • Bill Shorten’s strategy for winning the debate on marriage equality: don’t have one

    Bill Shorten’s strategy for winning the debate on marriage equality: don’t have one

    Though it didn’t attract a huge amount of comment, Bill’s Shorten’s article for Fairfax last Thursday may turn out to be an important moment in the campaign for marriage equality – not for the outcome, which is all but assured, but for the manner in which we reach that milestone. His argument – not new,…

  • On Avi Lewis’s This Changes Everything

    I emerged from the WA premiere of This Changes Everything in a foul mood. To get to the cinema – in Innaloo: not the most charming neck of the woods – I’d had to sit in heavy traffic for an hour and a half, moving barely at all. Arriving at the cinema one minute before…

  • From the archive: the Auden centenary

    Parnassus after all is not a mountain Reserved for A.1. climbers such as you; It’s got a park, it’s got a public fountain. The most I ask is leave to share a pew With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do … Reading these lines from ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936) on this, the occasion…

  • Geert by sea

    The official launch of the Australian Liberty Alliance in Perth on Tuesday afternoon brings to a head a disturbing trend in Australian politics: the tendency of the anti-Muslim right to cast its ideology in what we might call ‘civic nationalist’ terms. Taking its cue from the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom was…

  • How should we talk about multi-ethnic democracy?

    How should we talk about multi-ethnic democracy?

    Listening to the discussions on Q&A last week, and observing Malcolm Turnbull in Canberra meeting with Muslim community leaders, it became clear that the public discourse around Islamic extremism in Australia has undergone a major shift, which is to say a major elevation. ‘Team Australia’ is now conspicuous by its absence, while Tony Abbott’s ‘they’re…

  • Geert Wilders: a ghost at his own freedom feast

    When Geert Wilders assumes the podium at the launch of the Australian Liberty Alliance tomorrow evening – looking, one assumes, as he always does, like a Disney prince in a hall of mirrors – he will do so not just as the representative of a particularly nasty strain of anti-Muslim prejudice but as a living…