From the rather scant information available (the story having garnered little media attention), it appears that this week’s parliamentary debate on the Government’s mitochondrial donation bill followed a pretty familiar script. That script was written around four hundred years ago—in 1633, to be precise—and featured an ageing Galileo standing defiantly before the Roman Inquisition as it charged him with the crime of heresy for suggesting that the Earth moves round the Sun, rather than the other way about. According to one popular staging of the play, the guilty verdict was met with the words Eppur si muove—‘and yet it moves’—a… [Read more]

I’m thinking of running at the federal election next year. Not for the Senate because that’s rubbish, but the House of Reps. It’d be a difficult campaign because I’d have to come clean and admit to the electorate that I wasn’t interested in representing anyone or voting on anything. Nor would I be involved with formulating policy or ‘keeping the bastards honest’ or whatever politicians these days campaign on. My ambition is purely and simply to become Speaker. Having watched former backbencher Andrew Wallace sitting in the chair for the last two weeks, I am convinced that I could do… [Read more]

In 2011, I was cast in a production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the late American composer Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical. Sweeney Todd, about a murderous barber who slits the throats of his clients and his lovelorn landlord, Mrs Lovett, who bakes the bodies into pies and sells them, is one of the best and likely most popular of all Sondheim’s tricky, wondrous creations. I remember that, in our first run-through of the show as a team, our director asked us to speak all the lines, including the songs. It’s certainly an appropriate way of approaching… [Read more]

In the beginning was, by some accounts, the word. A profoundly unknowable moment, but if things ever did in fact ‘begin’, maybe a word is as good a place as any. But in what language, and with what meaning? In Christian gospel that moment of creation is refined further to a pinpoint in which ‘the word’ was both godly, and god; a flash of divinity from which the sentences of all existence might form and take flight, simultaneously creating our world and investing it with meaning. Regardless of belief, there is something compelling about the notion of an originating word…. [Read more]

What happens when the green left and the conservative right find themselves as strange bedfellows in their attempt to rattle the halls of democracy? Is it just a means to a shared end, does it run deeper than just this moment, and where have we seen this merger before? Much has been made recently of the association between the far-right as it infiltrates some of the more conservative responses to the current pandemic, and new-age ideas that revolve around lifestyle choices, spiritual thinking, and health and well-being. As Carl Cederström, author of Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization… [Read more]

It’s official.  Australia has been deemed the world’s worst performer at COP26. The Climate Action Network (CAN), an association of more than 1500 civil society organisations in over 130 countries dedicated to fostering sustainable action to avert the climate crisis, voted Australia the ‘colossal fossil’ of this year’s COP, dubbing our leaders ‘fossil fools’ and citing a series of ‘epic fails’ in our nation’s bogus policy to reach net zero. No podium finishes. No Academy Awards acceptance speeches. This was not, as Australia likes to write its own script for international success, a nation punching above its weight on the… [Read more]

Joshua Badge sits down with Driftpile Cree Nation writer, poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt for a conversation that covers (among much else) colonialism, revolution, rural life, truth, sex, joy, and his new collection of essays, A History of My Brief Body.   J: So I knew from the opening pages that I would enjoy the book because you dedicate it to ‘those for whom utopia is a rallying call’. That’s how I came to see it: as a call to arms, a dream about a world beyond the haunted house of the settler state, as you call it. BR: After reading Jose… [Read more]

I’m coming around to an idea first explored by Bernard Mandeville in The Grumbling Hive (and to a lesser extent, Jerry Seinfeld in Bee Movie) that it is our vices rather than our virtues which bind us together as a society and that if we are nice to each other and treat everyone fairly, the hive in which we all toil will fall apart. In other words, were we to rid ourselves of vanity and pride and greed and so on, there would simply be no incentive to get things done. It is the hankering for worldly stuff and secular… [Read more]

Michael Leunig’s journey from anti-war and anti-corporate provocateur to a critic of ‘wokeism’ and cancel culture is familiar and predictable. We’ve seen other prominent baby-boomer artists, thinkers and entertainers take the same path during the political realignments of the Facebook era. And there’ll be more—journalists seem determined to ask every cultural figure over 70 for their thoughts on Young People Today and their cancelling ways. David Williamson was asked just the other day. Leunig’s adoption of right-wing buzzwords is notable because he’s such an influential figure. A certified National Trust ‘Living Treasure’, his cartoons are part of the stock imagery… [Read more]