This post is written on unceded lands of the sovereign Darug people. I offer my respects to their elders and express my profound gratitude that our family may live safely here.
It has come to my attention that there are some gaps in Australian public knowledge of how Australian federalism works. While underemployed at home, I thought it might be useful to write up a bit of an explainer.
First Peoples First
The second most powerful man in Australia is hospitalised with Covid-19. In a crowded field, few men have done more to tear at the fabric of the Australian polity than Peter Dutton.
As one of the longest and hottest days of the year dawned, Australians woke up to the news that two volunteer fire fighters, Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer, are dead. The photos, published by the NSW Rural Fire Service, of each man smiling proudly and holding his baby for the camera are gut wrenching. They are western Sydney dads in their 30s, Aussie everymen.
A shorter version of this post (with proper spoiler alerts) was first published at ACRAWSA blog on 7 June 2019. Many thanks to director Partho Sen Gupta and to Prof Alana Lentin for entrusting me with tix to a film on a Sunday night in Randwick (in the pouring rain! see review, below).
Love in the Time of Terror: Slam at Sydney Film Festival
Review by Ingrid Matthews
[Alert: Spoilers]
According to the ABC election calculator, there was a 0.8 percent swing against the Liberal Party and a 1.0 percent swing against the Labor Party. The Liberal party leader is the prime minister and the Labor Party leader is headed for the back bench.
Where did the votes go?
There are two main layers to the misinformation that dominates coverage of the economy during this election campaign.
The first is the Coalition relying on major media to report its economic narrative for the entire ‘policy’ component of its re-election strategy. Everything else is meat pies and footy, horserace ephemera, church on Sunday, pub on Anzac Day.
[This post was first published on the evening of 11 April at the group blogging site Ausvotes 2019, which I have signed up to for the duration].
Some time in the first half of 2019, the third conservative Australian prime minister in five years will be compelled to call an election, which his Coalition government will lose. That man is Scott Morrison, the dodgily-selected member for Cook, representing one of the whitest and most racist areas of Sydney.
This post is written on the assumption that the current Australian government is defunct. Every outward sign appears, on my reading, to be the tip an iceberg, moving rapidly across the rising electoral oceans, to sink the Liberal Party of Australia. Good.
Around the time former Attorney-General George Brandis was made High Commissioner in London, I read that the Liberal Party of Australia caucus is an estimated two-thirds conservative and one-third ‘classical’ liberal. The context was the creation of a Home Affairs ‘mega-ministry’, a kind of government-sponsored corporate raid.