In 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...
Read MoreAn earthy citizen of a country led by politicians and journalists bugged by “boat people”, Chin Jin fits no standard categories. Now the foremost democrat in Sydney’s thriving Chinese community, he first set foot on the north-west shores of Australia...
Read MoreReaders interested in some of the big political ideas and trends of our time may like to listen to a recent talk on the greening of democratic politics. Hosted in Sydney by the newly-foundedInstitute for Democracy and Human Rights, it aimed...
Read MoreThis talk aims to provoke discussion about the long-term, ‘deep’ effects of green politics on the language and institutions and ‘imaginary’ of democracy. Some of these effects are more obvious than others, he points out. In half a generation, green-minded...
Read More[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="742"] A sign in New York in 1913 (click to enlarge). Flickr Commons/The Library of Congress. Public domain.[/caption] The following reflection on the subject of banks and democracy has been prepared for a forthcoming OECD meeting in Paris,...
Read MoreThe following remarks on truth and democracy were presented at the opening of a brainstorming session entitled Does Truth Really Matter in Australian Politics? Political Accountability in an Era of Agitated Media. The lively, all-day gathering of journalists, academics, students and...
Read MoreWith the Dalai Lama’s visit to Sydney just around the corner, I was naturally drawn to freshreports that during the past year the Chinese authorities have been experimenting in Tibet with a new political ‘grid’ (wangge) system of neighbourhood information-gathering units,...
Read MoreStrange are the times we’re living through. In matters of democracy, they feature many novel and contradictory global trends, none quite so potentially fractious as the political tension between majority rule government and public struggles to restrain and humble lethal...
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