As attacks on the façade of the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House finally come to an end, it’s easy to miss that attacks on the institution itself have been going on for years—but they haven’t come from violent mobs. They come from the Australian Government itself. For many years, the Museum has been a leading observer of the global decline of trust in democracy. In response to ‘the lowest level recording of public trust and satisfaction with Australia’s democratic arrangements and set against the global rise of debased semi-democracies,’ in 2018 the Museum established a research partnership […]

It was just another day in Australia’s arms race. In January, as the Omicron variant swept across Australia, infecting hundreds of thousands and placing hospital systems in NSW and Victoria under unprecedented strain, Defence Minister Peter Dutton announced a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the United States. Australia would be buying more than 100 M1A2 Abrams tanks from the United States, plus some whizz-bang bulldozers. The cost? $3.5 billion. Not bad in the middle of a pandemic. Wags on social media made jokes about whether they came with rapid antigen tests. The tank purchase is just the latest in a […]

At first it was catching COVID that scared me. But now, it’s how quickly everything has collapsed. Apparently, some part of me still believed that here in Australia, when it came down to it, governments would step in and protect us. All the evidence is against this belief, of course, but sometimes we hang on to irrational ideas just so we can get on with our day. Right now, I’m letting go of that belief. Because today we’re faced with a situation where an already existing, cheap-to-produce, simple-to-distribute technology that we need to keep us safe and which it was […]

At the end of yet another year in which the State of Israel has continued to entrench its settler-colonial, apartheid regime over the Palestinian people, Palestinian activists and artists are confronting yet another egregious example of the violent and dehumanising politics of ‘progressive except for Palestine.’ Sydney Festival, one of Australia’s most established and iconic annual cultural celebrations, has refused calls by Palestinian artists, activists and their supporters to divest from the Festival’s ‘Star Partner’ sponsorship with the Israeli Embassy in Canberra. This sponsorship is being used to support a Sydney Dance Company production of Decadence in the Festival program […]

I’m going to call it: 2022 is shaping up to be one of the most interesting federal elections since 1903. We know what’s going on in our national life as this dreadful pandemic year draws to a close, but what was so special about 1903? History buffs will recall that the Commonwealth Franchise Act was passed in 1902, a year after Australia became the world’s newest nation. That Act made Australia the world’s most democratic nation.  With the stroke of a pen, 800,000 new electors—women!—were added to the roll. This was earth-shattering news and it was reported across the globe. […]

  On Gulpilil and De Heer, collaborators through time.   ‘I’m a ballerina, a dancer, I’m an artist, I’m a writer and I studied the earth, same as David Attenborough.’ — David Gulpilil   I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of Aboriginal storytelling and cinematic storytelling. Here on one hand is the oldest form of storytelling in existence, and on the other is one of the youngest. And yet, the two intersect in a way that seems predestined. I think it is because both are mediums concerned with the manipulation and translation of time, and by extension, space–both communicating through […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]