An eclectic set of essays, the book Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19 tries to put forward a serious reform agenda. While there is a wealth of enthusiastic ideas, Upturn is unfortunately stronger on identifying problems than solutions. This post concentrates on the chapters discussing economic and social welfare. Reviews of other chapters will be posted in coming days.
Category: Arts
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Inspirational heroes abound – discover and promote them
Gellibrand MP Tim Watts draws on his family experience – his children, Hong Kong Chinese wife and in-laws – for his book “The Golden Country: Australia’s Changing Identity”. A modern response to Donald Horne’s 1960s “Lucky Country”, Watts see our future as a “golden country”, reflecting a largely Asian Australia. (more…)
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There’s nothing entrepreneurial about Rentier Capitalism, as it sucks up more of the wealth pie
‘Rentier Capitalism’ is a cracking thesis on a cruel economic order. Read it and you’ll start seeing rentiers everywhere, hearing them in every news bulletin, all involved in massive anti-competitive behaviour and impoverishing the rest of society. (more…)
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Humanity in medicine. The life of physician Dr Stanley Goulston
Proverbs 22.v.6 states: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.” I suspect Stan’s character was shaped by his deeply ingrained Jewish faith, the character of his father and father-in-law, the loss of a mother he never knew, an acute observation of inter-family relationships and a respectful obedience to authority. (more…)
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Review: Cruelty or Humanity by Stuart Rees
Cruelty or Humanity by Em.Prof. Stuart Rees, is essential reading in our present tumult and bedlam of human cruelty.
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P&I ISSUES in Stuart Rees’ Cruelty or Humanity , Bristol: Policy Press 2020
Regarded by international jurist Richard Falk as ‘A road map for humanity’ and by Noam Chomsky as ‘a wonderful guide to the challenges we face’, Stuart Rees’ ‘Cruelty or Humanity‘ identifies world-wide threats to freedom and democracy and displays the humanitarian alternatives.
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What can possibly be done with our political and policy malaise.Part 1.
Two new books are available or soon will be; (“How to Win an Election” by Chris Wallace and “What is to be Done?” by Barry Jones). Both focus on the state of the nation and the state of the ALP.
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Exposing the Hidden Hand
Clive Hamilton’s new book Hidden Hand: “Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World” is a diatribe. We do not need this hysteria when we are trying to maintain a modicum of practical relations with the People’s Republic of China. (more…)
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Book Review: “Hidden Hand” – Exposing how the Chinese communist party is reshaping the world (The Conversation 10.7.20)
In Hidden Hand, China scholars Clive Hamilton and Marieke Ohlberg examine the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Europe and North America in a similar way to how Hamilton dissected the CCP’s influence in Australia in his 2018 book, Silent Invasion.
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KIM WINGEREI. My week with Malcolm and a faltering democracy.
Otto von Bismarck (in)famously said: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best”. It is a sentiment I abhor. (more…)
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JUDITH WHITE. The Australia Council latest funding – the arts betrayed.
The latest round of The Australia Council funding, announced on 3 April, marks a new level of government interference in the arts. The council was never meant to police the arts on behalf of government, but under the Coalition that has become its function. (more…)
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GREG LOCKHART.- Quarantined in the Jazz Age
A friend mailed me recently to ask if I was well and safely distanced socially. He also pasted the following letter and asked me if I’d seen it. I hadn’t. (more…)
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MARK BUCKLEY. Rita Hayworth via Graham Green
I started to cull my books recently. As old age approaches I routinely decide that I need to gain more space, and to really get rid of what I will never get around to reading, sort of like “use it, or lose it”.
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JUDITH WHITE. Whatever happened to Whitlam’s vision for the arts?
In 1972 Gough Whitlam’s election campaign promised “to promote a standard of excellence in the arts, to widen access to, and the understanding and application of, the arts in the community generally, to help establish and express an Australian identity through the arts and to promote an awareness of Australian culture abroad”.
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David Walker’s Stranded Nation
Professor David Walker’s Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is a work of great and very readable erudition, which does something new: places Australian cultural, political and diplomatic history in its regional context at the time of Asian decolonisation. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. ‘Things you learn along the way’.
Occasionally friends suggest to me that I should write my autobiography. Ruefully I explain that I wrote ‘Things you learn along the way’ twenty years ago. The book sold about 8,000 copies but as far as I know is no longer available.
The book covers many aspects of my life: The early days as a footloose son of the Methodist manse; seven years in the ‘wilderness’ working for Gough Whitlam in Opposition; working for Rupert Murdoch in his better days; Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet to both Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, including the Dismissal; enjoyable family days in Japan as Ambassador; the most meaningful job of my life as Secretary of the Immigration Department during the Indochina Refugee Program; and a few years at Qantas where I found that Directors and my views were not necessarily the same.
See link below if you are interested in reading. (link also on home page ‘about John Menadue’.)
‘Things you learn along the way’.
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JUDITH WHITE. NSW arts policy officially in ruins
Arm’s length funding of the arts is the hallmark of a government attempting to work in the interests of the people. It prevents the arts being used as a political football, and together with peer assessment fosters the development of creativity. It was the founding principle in 1946 of the Arts Council of Great Britain, created by economist John Maynard Keynes and the Attlee Labour government, but came under sustained attack by the government of Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990). It was also the basis of the funding model for the Australia Council developed by the Whitlam government in 1973. But today that principle is being trashed.
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GRAHAM FREUDENBERG. Vale Evan Williams
No Australian adorned the professions of politics and journalism like Evan Williams. He was much more than a beautiful writer. He was a beautiful man, who brought a shining light and grace to thousands of lives. He died a few days ago. (more…)
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KATE McDOWELL. Together or not in the performing arts.
The way the performing arts is funded in Australia hasn’t changed since the 1990s, but the Australian cultural landscape has changed dramatically. (more…)
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GRAHAM ENGLISH. Virtue signallers, the left wing, and the politically correct
I try to follow the advice of one of my old teachers that if you cannot write as well as Jane Austen or one of the greats you can at least aim to be intelligible. Avoiding clichés and popular catch phrases is always a good start. (more…)
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ANDREW FROST. Alternative Histories, the ANZAC legend re-imagined on canvas
The assumption of ANZAC as the foundation of conservative Australia has been used to mobilise popular sentiment into dubious alliances in wars of questionable purpose. In this context, Rodney Pople’s latest exhibition, Shell Shocked, has urgency. His paintings are a vehicle for questioning more than a century of myth-making. (more…)
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CLAIR WILLS. Prodigal Fathers (The New York Review of Books).
More than twenty years ago, writing about Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, Colm Tóibín recalled what it was like to study history in Ireland in the 1970s—to be on the cusp of the revisionist wave, questioning all the old narratives. “Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction,” he wrote, “how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self.” The burden of having relatives has been a constant theme of Tóibín’s stories, essays, and reviews: “A Priest in the Family,” “How to Be a Wife,” “The Brother Problem,” “The Importance of Aunts,” “Mothers and Sons,” and, for equality’s sake, both “New Ways to Kill Your Mother” and “New Ways to Kill Your Father.” And these are just some of the titles. The desire to start from scratch, to worm (or to smash, but mostly to worm) your way out from under the yoke of dull, unavailable, or tyrannical parents figures in most of his fiction. (more…)
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MICHAEL MULLINS. Abstract thinkers living in bubbles.
During the Christmas break I read Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt, which is one of the more acclaimed Australian memoirs published during 2018. It details the wretched life he’s led and also challenges the culture warriors of the left and the right. Speaking about politicians as well as journalists, he says: ‘We don’t need more journalists from the right or from the left… What the media needs is more reporters with the ability to understand their subjects.’ (more…)
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ROBERT KUTTNER. The crash that failed.
Review of “Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world” by Adam Tooze, Viking.
The historian G.M. Trevelyan said that the democratic revolutions of 1848, all of which were quickly crushed, represented “a turning point at which modern history failed to turn”. The same can be said of the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted. We are still experiencing the reverberations. (more…)
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GREG LOCKHART. On reading Peter Stanley’s review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget.
I’ve just caught up with Peter Stanley’s review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914-18, which was posted on Pearls and Irritations on 15 November 2018. I mention this, because it provoked a response that I think deserves underlining: John Mordike’s 15 November reply, which pointed out that a main thrust of Stanley’s review is ‘wrong’. Coming to terms with this thrust will then lead me into a discrete criticism of Cochrane’s book.
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ANTHONY PUN. A response to Kim Wingerei -. It’s Time for Ethical Politics”
Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is still valid today. Man is born innocent and in his acquisition of power, goes astray when unguided by morals and ethical principles. True wisdom is the ability to exercise power with moral and ethical dignity. If these abilities are lost, the people need re-education in moral and ethical philosophy. (more…)
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LIONEL ORCHARD. Hugh Stretton in retrospect and prospect: reflections on Graeme Davison’s selected writings.
Graeme Davison has edited a new selection of Hugh Stretton’s writings. Stretton’s work is widely admired but how relevant is it now? Davison presents an assessment. A response follows. (more…)
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SUSAN CHENERY. The Scribe: portrait of Freudenberg, author of the speech that changed Australia (The Guardian 9.10.2018)
Legendary Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg was at the centre of power for more than 40 years. A new film sheds light on the man who wrote the script. (more…)
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TONY DOHERTY. Review of Hugh Mackay’s “Australia Reimagined – Towards a compassionate, less anxious society”.
Hugh Mackay has spent almost his entire working life asking Australians about what makes us tick, what are our basic concerns, what gives us hope and meaning, why do we do what we do? His acute observation, honed by the skills of solid social research, has illuminated his readers for at least fifty years. His analysis has been unfailingly optimistic, accessible, crystal-clear and frequently provocative.
His latest book, “Australia Reimagined: Towards a more compassionate, less anxious society”, is no exception. It extends his study of who we are and who we may become, challenging the better angels within us to build a more tolerant, compassionate and just society. (more…)
