Category: Politics

  • Community Campaigning can Trump Populism [article]

    Originally Published by ABC Religion and Ethics, 26 May 2022. “This was not your typical election outcome. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is forming government with the lowest primary vote in history. The moderate men of the Liberal Party were wiped out in urban areas by moderate liberal women. Populists Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson…

  • Two songs and two books with Gough Whitlam

    Like a lot of things with politics, I came to know about Gough late. I was of a generation who inherited his government’s landmark reforms – reforms I’ll forever be thankful for and hold as a model of progressive government – get in there and move things forward, don’t just tinker with the engine to…

  • Chasing Rabbits – Help! [September 2014]

    One of the many things I learned about while working in politics is chasing rabbits. It’s a pretty simple game – every time you see a rabbit you must chase it. It’s a bit like those ‘whack-a-mole’ games they used to have at amusement parlours, or the talking dogs in the Pixar movie Up, who…

  • Choose your words carefully

    The first piece of education I remember receiving was in Year One, at Our Lady Queen of Peace Primary School in Greystanes, Western Sydney. I would have been six. Mrs Szukalski – a tall, blonde woman in her early twenties, coincidentally (or not) my first crush that wasn’t fictional – told the class that for…

  • The problem with expensive things

    If I tell you that something is expensive, what do you think? For example a few years ago I bought a second-hand copy of George Orwell’s essay collection England Your England for $35. Is that expensive? On Amazon a second-hand hardcopy edition of the same collection is $25. Does that change your impression? Love0 Share…

  • Thoughts on ANZAC Day 2014

    A collection of reflections on the idea of ANZAC Day across the 2014 ANZAC Day weekend. Love0 Share Tweet Share Pin

  • Thoughts on the Biennale Boycott

    A record of my thoughts from a conversation across two Facebook posts about the outcome of the boycott campaign by some artists/activists to get the Sydney Biennale to divest from links with Transfield Holdings, a subsidiary of which runs the Australian detention centre in Nauru and which was last week awarded a billion-dollar contract to…

  • Blind arrogance or sheer ignorance

    I am not prone to anger, but this sentence from the first front page article of The Saturday Paper got my blood boiling: “These deaths weighed heavily on the conscience of politicians as they struggled in 2012 to find a policy that would stop people undertaking the journey.” Love3 Share Tweet Share Pin