If you’re not John Bolton, stop reading. This isn’t for you. Though if you could pass this on to John Bolton for me, that’d be great. Cheers. John, how are ya mate? I hear you’re trying to kick off another illegal imperial quagmire in the middle east again. Tut-tut John, you already have two wars on the side, you’re a greedy little bugger trying to kick off a third, who do you think you are, Burt Reynolds? Check your mustache and your privilege mate. Anyway, do you like movies? Clearly you see anyone hailing from anywhere east of east Connecticut […]

Tony Smith was re-elected unopposed as Speaker of the House of Representatives yesterday, the third time he’s managed it without an opponent. No-one’s done that since the first Speaker, Frederick Holder, between 1901 and 1909. Smith’s nomination was moved by Lucy Wicks, the Liberal member for Robertson, and seconded by Maria Vamvakinou, the ALP member for Calwell. Comity. Bipartisan support for a man doing a difficult job well. It was a hopeful sign for the opening of the 46th Parliament, which was otherwise greeted by a Daily Telegraph front page bellowing, ‘Give us what we voted for’. Civility and respect […]

It is a mini season of anniversary and memory. A major historical event, a personal re-connection, a television show.  Remembrance daring consideration of what we were and what we are now. The 1969 moon landing still resonates. It seemed to draw a hopeful line under two years of trauma—Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy.  For this scrawler, they were also the years when the boy was emerging from childhood.  The memories are more complete, more rounded, although stunningly inadequate. As someone whose memories are structured around the triangulation or coincidence of residence, education, employment, relationships and current events, there is […]

Chronicling Donald Trump’s many flaws—as a man, as a husband/father/politician/businessman/actor/pizza hawker—has kept many of us (un)happily distracted for the past eight hundred or so days. As bountiful as that flaws list is, credit where credit is due: the man is an exceptional media manipulator. I draw no pleasure in complimenting him, but watching Trump lie and misdirect and conjure evermore distractions to whiplash media attention from one calamity to the next is something he’s disproportionately gifted at. Americans were pitched a showman, they voted in a showman, and surprise surprise, a showman now binges on cable news in the Oval […]

Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy is a short story, in the form of a first-person account voiced by a human-like ape who was shot and captured in West Africa then transported to Europe by ship in a cage. ‘Red Peter’ is driven to escape his cage, so he embraces the process and performance of becoming human, which includes learning to speak and behave like one of his captors. ‘Freedom was not what I wanted,’ he reports, retrospectively. ‘Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out […]

In the 1997 film The Castle, the obvious-talking young narrator named Dale Kerrigan has a totalising faith in the promise of shared, familial love. Even the threat of potential house demolition, the material site of this ‘togetherness’, merely commits him further to the promise. Yet we only know this promise once it flickers; once it passes to unreliability. For Dale, this happens at two precise moments when he surveys his family sharing tender points in time. As if short-circuited, the wholesome scenes are dramatically cut in the film. Instead of warm fuzzies, all Dale can think about is his brother, […]

President Harry Truman attracted much enmity in the post-Roosevelt era of the 1940s. Sometimes it was based on little more than snobbery about his humble origins. More substantively, programs such as health-care reform incited the hostility of entrenched interests. Decades later, President Bill Clinton liked to say of his now-lionised predecessor: ‘My family supported Truman when he was actually president.’ The memorial service for Bob Hawke last Friday was a similar mix of reality, misremembrance and romanticism. The ingredients of political success remain both obvious and mysterious. It is now broadly acknowledged that Hawke led a highly competent government of […]

In March 1996, three US servicemen stationed in Okinawa were convicted of the abduction and sexual assault of a 12-year-old Japanese girl. It was the first time the US military prosecuted any of its soldiers since they first occupied the island in the 1940s. This is despite the fact that Japanese activists had protested both the occupation itself, and the apparent impunity of the servicemen since one of them raped a six-year-old girl in 1955. Those three servicemen all pleaded guilty to various charges associated with the assault. This caused ripples in a military known to be myopically protective of […]

Last evening Facebook released an extensive whitepaper detailing its new ‘Libra’ cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies—like the original, Bitcoin—create a secure, trustworthy and verifiable technology to maintain the entries within an accounting ledger. They’re secure because they use cryptography—similar to what your web browser uses when talking to your bank. They’re trustworthy because transactions are subject to a consensus-based approval of everyone using the currency, so no one can cook the books. And they’re verifiable because anyone can come along and inspect those books—if you claim you have a certain amount of cryptocurrency, that claim can be proven (or disproven) easily. Invented as […]