Blogs

This week both the Australian Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and the Liberal National Party Malcolm Turnbull claimed electoral victory. 

In fact, we all lost.

Climate Change

Climate Change our greatest challenge was ignored.  The result will be more of the same, both parties support opening new coal mines and continue to ignore the climate crisis.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is based on a lie. It's been happening since the mid 70s when US economist Milton Friedman & Austrian/British economist Friedrich Hayek finally threw out the long standing economic traditions of British economist John Maynard Keynes, (who had focussed on government policy to avoid the problems of unplanned market forces made clear in the 1929 crash), and replaced it with a return to *unrestrained competition*. Neoliberalism took up this argument with a passion.

#Bixit

The lie of Neoliberalism goes something like this:

All the pundits have been banging on about how most of us don't make up our minds about who we'll vote for in an election until a few days, or even hours, before we enter the little booth to leave our mark on democracy.

Well, I don't know about you but I pretty much made up my mind at birth; I could never vote for a Tory and my class loyalty comes first.

And it's too close to call (maybe), Labor is going to take some seats of the Coalition, a handful of Greens and independents will sit in the lower house and the Senate will be another dog's breakfast.

Protest on Nauru

Every day since 20 March, asylum seekers on Nauru have demonstrated in the family camp, OPC3, against almost three years of detention in appalling conditions on Nauru.

While Malcolm Turnbull boasts that there are no longer children in closed detention in Australia, he wilfully holds children, women and families in detention in mouldy tents, and confined, with no future on Nauru.

We’re at that stage of the election campaign where many people have had enough. “I just switch off”, we hear, or “politicians are all the same”. Yet we rarely hear about a loss of interest in gossip about Mariah Carey’s wedding, or Johnny Depp’s divorce, or anything at all about the Kardashians. In fact, the world’s massively rich and successful entertainment industry is predicated on humans’ insatiable appetite for the minutiae of dross. 

The NBN has long been a dream of many Australians; fast ubiquitous broadband that can keep pace with our ever growing data needs. It was a modest plan in many ways, portrayed by opponents as the ‘Rolls Royce of broadband plans’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The history of capitalism & socialism

I recently saw a YouTube video by Dr. Richard Wolff, University of Massachusetts professor emeritus, entitled "Capitalism Hits the Fan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al12e1EVmZU

The video covers the history capitalism and socialism. 

One thing that the world of Twitter has taught me is that, if the Liberal Party is a very broad church, as someone or other is always saying, the Left is simply a place without walls or windows or doors. It is bound by nothing. But it took Twitter to make this clear.

If you’ve followed politics throughout your life, as I have, then you will know about how things have ‘developed’.

I became interested in politics as a young Adelaidean during the 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign. I hadn’t realised that my parents were Liberal Party voters until they cheered on Fraser’s crimes against democracy in 1975. This made me start to realise my sense of "right and wrong" was separate to theirs. Each of us 'individuates' like this or, at least, we damned-well should.

Constitutional crisis?

That was a week, that was. Question, Mr Speaker: If the lying, cheating, rorting, corrupt, secretive, racist, child-molesting, rapist, murderous, incompetent, hypocritical (and I use these words advisedly) buffoons in Canberra offer you a "referendum or a plebiscite?", do you reply "please sir, I want some more?" or is it a Constitutional crisis?