January, 2010

Who stole the Australia Day long weekend? Once upon a time, not very long ago, it was the ultimate take time out, end of summer holidays three days! The image of Australia Day was beaches and barbies maybe (but not with a national prescribed meat, sponsored by advertisers), symbolising shrugging off summer sloth! And it [...]

Sri Lankans have been voting today in a “tense” presidential election. President Mahinda Rajapakse has another 22 months of his term to run, but – most unusually for presidential systems – he has the power to call an early election, and did so to cash in on his presumed popularity from the defeat of the [...]

Every school day of my Bjelke-Petersen era Queensland childhood, my classmates and I were lined up for a military-style parade – attention. Stand at Ease! Honour the flag – turn! Every morning, we watched as the flag was raised and  swore to “always honour my Queen, my flag and my country”. I don’t feel as though I am violating [...]

Silly season reached a sort of climax this weekend, when The Australian announced Kevin Rudd was its Australian of the Year “because of the way he dealt with the global financial crisis.” That was a bit odd, to put it mildly, to put it as understatedly and blandly as possible.  The national broadsheet spent 2009 [...]

I think I’ve remarked before on the media’s ability to give exhaustive, even obsessive, coverage to an issue but still manage to ignore the more interesting aspects of it. Last week’s disaster in Haiti provides another good example. We’ve had seemingly endless footage of ruined buildings, homeless children, dead and injured Haitians, overloaded aid efforts [...]

Paul Syvret is one of the regular writers for the Courier-Mail. When he’s not writing pieces about politics and the economy – usually in a manner which tries to make economic news intelligible – he writes general opinion pieces. Maybe it’s the opportunity to sound off about something other than economics and politics, but from [...]

Keysar Trad has campaigned for legal recognition of polygamous marriage on Crikey. And I didn’t exactly hold back in expressing my disagreement. But despite this history, my motivation for revisiting the issue now is concern for Keysar’s wellbeing, after reading a Sisters In Islam report on opendemocracy on polygamy in Malaysia. Sisters in Islam found that polygamous marriages [...]

A speech by Eva Cox from the Sydney Festival on hope. 2010: a hope-full starting point for renewal to fix the crises caused by the last thirty odd years of bad policy and politics.

Sometimes maintaining a consistent message can be difficult for a political party to manage in the early period following a leadership change. But sometimes, efforts to do so can just make the message itself seems internally incoherent. As long ago as  last June, the Liberal Party was demanding that “it’s time” for the Labor government [...]

Even as temperatures in South Australia and Victoria soared into the mid-40s today, in north-western Europe they’ve been languishing a similar distance below zero. Last Friday, SBS news screened a BBC report (you can watch the original here) that combined dramatic pictures of the freeze with a discussion of how it has given heart to [...]