Increasingly, the Coalition parties view the 2019 election as Napoleon’s retreating armies viewed the retreat from Russia: likely ignominious defeats on the move were still better than the certainty of dying from a stationary exposure. Unlike Napoleon’s army, though, there are too few knapsacks left among the Liberal infanterie which could still hide a baton. Indeed, the old guard and chasseurs have long since departed. Like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Coalition’s six years in government have been, simply, a disaster for its purported cause. We are now at the battle of Leipzig stage, with a fatal retreat to the… [Read more]

Since early 2016, I have watched on helplessly as right-wing factions in both the federal and state Liberal parties led a campaign to destroy their own program designed to protect LBGTI students in schools. At some point, powerful people in the party must have made a decision that they could win votes by exploiting the fact that very young transgender children are sometimes misunderstood. They set in motion a dialogue that framed Safe Schools as a program to indoctrinate children rather than protect them, spreading misleading information about the program, designed to create fear. Worse, the party have demonstrated no… [Read more]

How impossible it is to decide on a reason for writing. Why DO I write? Because it’s the only way I know to live. Another cliché: I’ve written for as long as I remember, a lonely child with only my mind for company. No books allowed! Not because I was banned from them, but because there was no sense in pursuing intellectual pursuits in a home where survival was the most basic of instincts. There was no parental library, but there were public libraries and the school library, and the only thing that made sense then—and still does now, if… [Read more]

A new organisation was launched at the ABC headquarters at Ultimo yesterday. Called the ABC Alumni, it describes itself as a ‘a community of former staff and supporters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’. As Banjo Paterson might have put it, all the cracks had gathered to the fray. There was Kerry O’Brien, the most famous alumni currently on a book tour promoting his memoir. There was the near sanctified broadcaster Caroline Jones. There was Timothy Bowden, once of the ABC television program Backchat, and there was Jonathan Holmes formerly of Media Watch, Robyn Williams of the Science Show and a… [Read more]

A little-used expression that I really like is ‘praising with faint damnation’. The opposite of a more popular saying, ‘damning with faint praise’, it describes a way of politely under-reacting to something truly stupid or awful. It’s the ‘you’re going to need a bigger boat’ of political discourse. I thought of it yesterday when I read Tanya Plibersek’s reaction to the government’s Women’s Economic Security Statement. ‘After five years of Liberal governments, Kelly O’Dwyer’s announcements today are too little, too late,’ she said. Plibersek isn’t wrong, per se, just as Martin Brody wasn’t wrong in Jaws when he pointed out that… [Read more]

Look across the Maribynong River from the west as the sun sets and you’ll see the glass-panelled city skyline ablaze in reflected gold. It’s easy to remember, in that brief moment of fire, that this modern city is built on sacred ground, on stolen land. I’m in my colleague’s office at Victoria University in Footscray. A comfortable armchair in the corner is hung with the red, yellow and black of the Aboriginal flag; plants in coloured pots sit on the windowsill. The walls and shelves are a riot of artwork, posters and photos. Among them is a sepia-tinted image of… [Read more]

‘Illness,’ Susan Sontag writes in the opening pages of Illness as Metaphor, ‘is the night-side of life… Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ Running my experience of childhood through my mind, I’m not sure I’ve ever lived in the kingdom of the well. Compulsions laced the daily drives to school which arched around the city from Lower Mitcham to North Adelaide. My compulsive counting would distract me from the aggressively cheerful 1960s British pop Dad would play over and over. The kingdom of the sick… [Read more]