When visiting Tokyo last week for the launch of the Japanese edition of The Life and Death of Democracy, it was pure coincidence, or sweet and sour serendipity, that the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe steamrolled through parliament a controversial...
Read MoreVibrant democracies need sharp-angled and unceremonious characters like Lou Reed who can rail against imperiousness and conformity, writes John Keane. [caption id="attachment_9170" align="alignnone" width="741"] PHOTO: Lou Reed embodied detached cool and passionate anger. (Tracey Nearmy: AAP)[/caption] It's said often that democracy requires...
Read MoreBy Giovanni Navarria, University of Sydney and John Keane While Australians face the possibility of the first-ever Senate by-election, as well as stormy sittings of a new parliament wrangling over the pro and cons of scrapping a carbon tax, 16,000 kilometres away,...
Read MoreIt’s difficult from afar to grasp the depressing scale and depth of European disintegration, so let me try from close range to convey something of what’s going on by using a simple method: extracting snippets of randomly-chosen local political news...
Read MorePerhaps the only bright democratic light in this dark crisis surrounding Syria is the unexpected growth of a cross-border, large-scale and ultimately global denunciation of the follies and horror of war, writes John Keane. Does democracy have anything to do with...
Read More‘No bourgeois, no democracy’ is the racy formulation penned half a century ago by the American historian Barrington Moore Jr. It’s a well-known political maxim, one that’s often used in support of the view that to be middle class is...
Read More‘No bourgeois, no democracy’ is the racy formulation penned half a century ago by the American historian Barrington Moore Jr. It’s a well-known political maxim, one that’s often used in support of the view that to be middle class is...
Read MoreIn the midst of a two-party dominated and heavily-scripted federal election campaign, I spoke with the widely-respected and independently-minded Senator Scott Ludlam (Greens, Western Australia) about his life-long interest in urban thinking and city life as a laboratory of new...
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkd6_duJHoc[/youtube] In our age of monitory democracy, as Rupert Murdoch is once again learning to his cost, rascals and rogues are finding it hard to conceal from public attention their private wheeler-dealing. The latest ‘we will hit back’ revelations published by the...
Read MoreMy first moments with His Holiness last week were not quite what I’d expected. In pulled the police-escorted motorcade, sirens wailing, blue lights flashing, bang on time, according to plan. As the motorcade drew to a halt, the small welcoming...
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