Investigating The Banks: A Royal Commission In Australia
On Collins Street, Melbourne lies a monument that acts as a gloriously loud remark about how banks are treated in Australia. The ANZ Gothic Bank, studded with stain glass windows,…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Mammoth Divorce Bills: The EU And The Surrender Of The Brexiters
The parties had been groping (appropriate, given the daily revelations about harassment) for some common ground. There had been discussions about having further discussions, hedging, ducking and weaving. In a…
Theatre, Death And The ICTY: The Suicide of Slobodan Praljak
Theatre, hysterics, denunciations. No tight, orderly and sterile space could ever entirely contain those dark characters with lengthy butcher’s bills and blood soaked attributes. Screams accompanied accusations; words to make…
Branagh, Poirot And Murder on the Orient Express
Few could have colonised a role as comprehensively as David Suchet playing Hercule Poirot, that pedantic, fastidious figure of sleuthing fame created by Agatha Christie. Manner, affectation, and delivery all…
The Vanishing Submarine: Hope And The ARA San Juan
“Once a submariner, always a submariner.” Douglas Renken, Canadian submariner, CBC, Nov 26, 2017 A certain type of grief and moroseness accompanies deaths at sea. Not being naturally adapted to…
The Rhetorical Trap: North Korea as “State Sponsor of Terrorism”
Are such designations ever useful? At the stroke of a pen, an entire state is designated “terrorist” or a seemingly milder sponsor of terrorism, its name finding a way onto…
The Violent Conclusion: Manus Island And The Clearing of Lombrom Naval Base
It was another etching in a chronicle of extended violence. For days, resistance by refugees and asylum seekers against forced removal from the Lombrom Naval Base on Manus Island had…
Foreign Policy Blues: The Australian Foreign Policy White Paper
The Australian Foreign Policy White paper was touted as a main course for consumers of policy, a document that revealed the inner workings of those creatures working for the Department…
History, Law And Ratko Mladić
While Zimbabwe was changing under various inexorable forces of power, the more sterile surrounds of The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia offered the scene for…
Crocodiles And Freedom Fighters: Zimbabwe, Colonialism And Violence
The strongman lost some muscle this week. Robert Mugabe, a leader of the liberation movement that transformed colonially pressed Rhodesia into post-colonial Zimbabwe, had issued a letter of resignation. There…
A New Movement Of Rights And The Right In Australia
Scholars have wondered what “triggers” might be in the social furniture of a culture that might propel a people to embrace a bill of rights. Australia remains proudly, and idiosyncratically,…
The Veiled Threat: Australia’s Campaign Against New Zealand Refugee Policy
Another twist in the farce over the stained treatment of refugees on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island has surfaced. New Zealand has been insisting for some time that it is…
Trump And The Nuclear Option: The Fiction of Sanity
It had not happened in decades. On Tuesday, members of the US Congress gathered to consider the scope of presidential power in launching a nuclear strike. The state of the…
Trump In Asia
It was certainly a show, but getting to the meat of it was difficult. US President Donald J. Trump, on his return from an Asian tour lasting twelve days, had…
The Expensive Affirmation: Australia Says Yes To Same Sex Marriage
The overall figure was comfortable, though hardly dashing. 62 percent of Australians (7.82 million) decided that same sex marriage was a perfectly feasible, even desirable notion, while 38 percent (4.87…
The Fordist Academic
Two figures tower over the idea, and the realisation, of industrial America. The first is Henry Ford, whose factory process dedicated to mass car production featured specifically focused machinery, a…
Idiot Voters And Trolling The Internet: Russia, Social Media Giants And US Elections
The program usually pokes fun, riddles and irks a fourth estate that has long given up the chase for verity. Media Watch, after years of weather beaten but reliable service,…
Trans-Pacific Follies: Australia Asleep As Canada Wakes Up
It was as dreary as listening to the formulaic assessments of political economy by an unreconstructed Leninist. But Sunday morning with Steve Ciobo, Australia’s trade minister, was such an occasion.…
War Commemoration Porn: Remembrance Day Celebrations
The officials are called one by one to lay wreathes, a ceremony of mechanical efficiency. With each laying comes the sense of wonder at how this could happen. Political figures…
The Tragic Declaration: Colonial Legacies, Balfour And Israel
So much after the fact; so much in terms of opportunism gone to seed and destruction. But planned historical calamities tend to be rare. There are only absurd moments, dastardly…
When Illness Matters: Massacre In Texas
The massacre at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs was, to put it simply, effective and spectacular. It also had the resonances of the primeval, ignoring the sanctity of…
A Triumph Of Accountancy: The Paradise Papers
This was another case of the big and the powerful undercutting the tax systems of the world. But could anyone be genuinely surprised at the revelations to come out of…
Why WikiLeaks Was Right: Rigging The Democratic Way
It took some time of muzzling and concealment before the horror, but various Democrats have finally come clean about the Hillary Clinton machine: things were, it seems, rigged, stacked, and…
Michael Fallon’s Fall: The Sexual Harassment Storm In British Politics
Sexual harassment - it’s revelation, that is - is all around at the moment, a toxic cold that is giving political establishments not so much a sneeze as debilitating pneumonia. …
A Lethal Gift: The Halloween Attack, Trump And Immigration
It could not have been scripted better for the demagogues and security hysterics. With the country still grieving in confusion in the aftermath of the Las Vegas slayings, inflicted by…
An Acceptable Obscenity: Adani Cultivates Queensland
Townsville: The cicadas are studding the night with their sound, and occasionally, the curlews manifest with calls that string out a melody of mournful death. The reminder of Queensland, and certainly…
Madness on Horseback: The Charge At Beersheba
“The tradition of man and horse is part of us. It is part of Australia.” Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, Oct 31, 2017 Exaggerated truths have been flowering in the…
Chaos On Manus Island
There are standoffs, threats and continuing tensions over the imminent closure of the Manus Island Detention Centre. (The politically palatable term here is “processing centre”.) This closure, instigated by legal…
Strafing Parliament: Australia’s High Court Citizenship Ruling
And they fell like ninepins. Weeks of predictions, optimistic readings, and hopeful signs were dashed as the members of the highest court of Australia laid waste to members of Parliament.…
Pirating Into The Czech Elections
The Pirate Party are buccaneering their way into European politics, having found a foothold in the testy soil of Central Europe after colonising, in small measure, various hamlets in Sweden,…
Corker And Flake Take Aim: GOP Rumblings Against Trump
GOP members were fuming. Republican Senator Bob Corker of the Foreign Relations Committee was incandescent; Senator Jeff Flake oozed regret and despondency. Both spoke with the freedom of those not…
US Soldiers In Niger: A Hidden Global Mission
Empires of scale are often spread thinly across fields of operations. Vast, often opaque functions on the ground are not necessarily conveyed with accuracy to the metropolitan centre. Command structures,…
Environmental Protest: Bob Brown Wins In Australia
Environment activists and watchers will be detaching themselves briefly from their various points of resistance to observe the implications of a High Court decision in Australia that was handed down…
A Matter of Fifty Degrees: Climate Change In Australia
A country baked to the core, its citizens roasted, an electricity grid battered to its limits. Capital cities trapping scorching heat, toasting its citizens and assaulting the young, the elderly,…
The Trans-Tasman Spat Show: New Zealand-Australian Tensions
It was an awkward moment for Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop. News had arrived that a New Zealand government had been formed after a lengthy period of deliberation. (The election…
Australia’s Citizenship Bill Fails
This is a government that takes pride in its hard headedness and faux populism. Knowing it would have to brave a sceptical, even baffled Senate, Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton,…
Vengeful In Defeat: Hillary Clinton Fantasises About WikiLeaks
The Hillary Clinton mope tour, which should have reached a high water mark, has gone global. It entails drumming up her credentials (immaculate, we are told, but unnoticed), and pouring…
Trump’s Iran Deal
Bad deals. Very bad – unless, of course, they are minted in the United States, with Make America Great Again credentials. Hardly the stuff of presidential clout and oratorical flair,…
Dirty Ties: The University of New Haven And Saudi Arabia
It’s a relationship of dirty toxicity, but these abound when universities establish ties with regimes and certain entities. These might take the form of investments. Or they can become matters,…
Climate Change Insurgent: Tony Abbott’s Crusade
He is the inimitable, true political ugliness, the bad boy with a mistimed punch. While not quite professorial in his lunacy (that honour will have to go to Pauline Hanson…
Big Batteries: Elon Musk And Powering South Australia
At the end of last month, Tesla boss Elon Musk held a party in South Australia’s mid-north. It seemed premature, but Musk was typically confident. Construction on what will be…
Signals From The Adult Day Care Center: Trump, Tillerson And Corker
“I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” Senator Bob Corker on Donald Trump, New York Times, Oct…
Nuclear Weapons, ICAN And The Nobel Prize
“There are no right hands for the wrong weapons.” Beatrice Fihn, ICAN Executive Director, Oct 6, 2017 Few times in history show the remarkable gulf between international civic action and…
The Face of Surveillance: Malcolm Turnbull’s Recognition Database
Never miss an opportunity in the security business. A massacre in Las Vegas has sent its tremors through the establishments, and made its way across the Pacific into the corridors…
Boris Johnson Goes Caracas
“Shame people with no knowledge or understanding of Libya want to play politics with the appallingly dangerous reality in Sirte.” Boris Johnson, Twitter, Oct 3, 2017 The Conservative Party conference…
What’s In A Word? Terrorism In Las Vegas
‘We don’t know what his belief system was at this time.’ Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, Oct 2, 2017 Those gathered at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas…
A Cuban Mystery: The US Embassy in Havana
Cuba has, for decades, been a form of political pathology for US political consciousness. Fidel Castro loomed in his indestructible guise, tormenting a succession of American presidents with his seeming…
Macklemore And The NRL Grand Final: The Politics of Sports
One cultivated myth of human endeavour is the creaky and far from convincing idea that politics and sport are strangers, gazing indifferently from distant across tables, never to engage. Battles…
Punishing The Media: The Fantasies Of The CIA And William J. Casey
“Unauthorized disclosures of classified information have become a cancer which undermines presidential authority to conduct foreign policy, our national security process, and our intelligence capabilities.” William J. Casey, Director of…
Kurdistan’s Referendum Gamble
“We hope for a unified Iraq to annihilate ISIS, and certainly a unified Iraq to push back on Iran.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House spokeswoman, Sep 25, 2017 What a…
Angela Merkel: The Ikea Politician
“The recipe for her success, which she has only latterly discovered, is that she’s been able to develop an image as someone who is tuned in to the German soul.”…
The Intolerance of Tolerance: Tony Abbott’s Head Butt Episode
“This was a violent and criminal act, nothing whatsoever to do with the point of view of those of us who favour a yes vote.” Senator George Brandis, Australian Attorney-General,…
Benjamin Netanyahu, Penguins And The United Nations
“That’s why Israel’s policy regarding the nuclear deal with Iran is very simple: Change it or cancel it. Fix it or nix it.” Benjamin Netanyahu, UN General Assembly Address, 2017…
Brexiting Hard: Boris Johnson Goes To War
The Times was none too pleased, riled and concerned. Contributors to The Spectator were wondering whether an imminent implosion was about to take place. Who would profit from this act…
The Demise of Civic Journalism: The Xenophon-Turnbull Deal
It was never spectacular, but the Australian media scape is set to become duller, more contained, and more controlled with changes to the Broadcasting Services Act. In an environment strewn…
Donald Trump At The UN
It seems to have reached a point of near exhaustion. What will the President of the United States do next? The money was on some diplomatic mayhem, a series of…
The CIA Wins: Harvard, Chelsea Manning And Visiting Fellowships
It all began with an announcement, made public on the website of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics at Harvard University. Chelsea Manning would be joining a curious array of…
Manning At Harvard: The Fears of Veritas
“I have an obligation to my conscience – and I believe to the country – to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.” Michael…
Damaging Damages: Rebel Wilson’s Defamation Case
There is very little to be gained pondering whether celebrity journalism should be protected with the zeal that some of its advocates do. A person with the dirt-directed fanaticism of…
Steve Bannon’s Crystal Ball: A Split In The GOP
Rarely does the virus speak so formidably to the condition he is a product of. The soiling, devastating strategist Steve Bannon, despite exiting the Trump administration, remains within it (symbolically…
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