Politics | Liticism

POLITICS |

Tony Abbott, ebook author

Today, Tony Abbott, like Australia’s own Hannah Horvath, announced the publication of an ebook. Titled The Little Book of Big Labor Waste – invoking perhaps the wildly successful late-90s Little Book of Calm – the Coalition’s new work takes as its theme “60 examples of Labor waste and mismanagement from the Gillard Government,” an ironic inversion of the meditation [...]

POLITICS |

Guest Post — The Political Post-Apocalypse: Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow’s Left Turn

Guest post by Adam Brereton Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow, in the introduction to their new book Left Turn: Political Essays For The New Left, invite the reader to imagine current examples in popular culture that envision a future ‘in which the world to come is, in any respect whatsoever, an improvement on the present.’ [...]

POLITICS |

Guest Post — Finding the people behind a revolution: Johnny West’s Karama!

Guest post by Max Denton It’s now been a year since the old orders of the Arab world began to crumble under the weight of popular protest. It was the first time in my lifetime that I’d witnessed, albeit from afar, the strength of raw people power to affect large-scale change. This, plus the ability [...]

POLITICS |

Mungo MacCallum’s The Good, the Bad & the Unlikely

Some we know because their personalities were memorable – such as Keating or Hawke. Some, because of famous or tragic stories – such as Harold Holt’s mysterious end (and the rather poor taste, though admittedly amusing, fact that he has a memorial pool named after him in Melbourne). Some we know because they led not [...]

POLITICS |

Doing history slowly: Paul Keating’s After Words

Though the Keating era was somewhat before my time, there’s been many an afternoon I’ve spent happily watching Keating rants on youtube (such is the excitement of life as a PhD student). In the utter linguistic banality of our current political period, it’s sometimes heartening to watch lively political debate, and in clip after clip Keating consistently delivers – [...]