If there was a machine capable of detecting reticence and hostility towards democracy there’s no doubt it would be working overtime in this European crisis. It would buzz and bleep in more than a few locations, some of them unexpected, including...
Read MoreShortly after touching down in Berlin last week, I contact a friend who says she’s on her way home to Athens, to vote in this weekend’s cliff-hanger election, the most desperate since the defeat of military dictatorship four decades ago....
Read MoreRethinking the history of the impact of representative democracy upon Indigenous peoples. Although the first Australian association of self-declared democrats was formed in Sydney only in 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe, the political tides flowing in their favour were...
Read MoreIn The Fixed Period, the 19th-century English writer Anthony Trollope describes a university college where the professors are compulsorily retired at 67, given a year to contemplate the world, then peacefully extinguished from the ways of the world with a...
Read MoreFrom Tunis to Oakland, Madrid to Athens and Sydney, an estimated 900 major occupations of public places by citizens took place around the world during the past 12 months. The following notes probe their political significance. With apologies to Marx...
Read MoreThe internationally renowned democracy expert, Professor John Keane, joined a special Sydney Writers' Festival panel discussion on Thursday 17 May in the University of Sydney's Great Hall on the future of the Occupy movement. Listen to Audio div.episode h3 { display: none; }...
Read MoreEvery joke resembles a tiny revolution, George Orwell once wrote. He had a point. Even when they’re instantly forgotten, of little or no consequence or just plain silly, jokes momentarily disrupt the settled routines of our daily lives. The joker...
Read MorePirate Party campaign ‘ship’, Cologne, March 2008 Tobias Walter/flickr Is there life after conventional parliamentary politics? That’s the intriguing question on the lips of many German citizens this weekend as supporters of the Pirate Party assemble in the north German city of...
Read More[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="237"] Bob Brown at the University of Newcastle, 1986 University of Newcastle Cultural Collections/Flickr[/caption] Archaeologists tell us that Sumerian kings had their face slapped once a year by a priest to remind them of the importance of humility....
Read More[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="237"] Günter Grass, at the New York Public Library, June 2007 Flickr[/caption] Günter Grass has dared say publicly in a poem what needed saying: the present Netanyahu government of Israel is a potential danger to its own people,...
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