I lost it just a little in an interview on Hobart radio earlier this week. Tim Cox was interviewing me about Pauline Hanson and he started talking about separation of powers.

It is one of those inevitable laws of nature that in this age of white hot competition for work, it’s the mediocre who have established themselves as the deciders of who gets what. Mostly this is because the people in middle and upper management got their jobs when it was easy, and they slotted themselves […]

It’s a million degrees here in Perth, absurdly hot for this time of year, so naturally my fan decided to pack up on me. It was one of those cheap ones from Target and I’d had it a couple of years. The new one is a different brand, but still made in China. It came […]

Well, a satisfactory ending to this excellent ABC program, ‘Marking Time’, and so what was John Doyle saying? The town of Brackley is of course both a town and Australia in microcosm. As a small country town, Doyle shows how it is sociality or community or social capital that keeps it livable. Even the whackos […]

We recently lost one Australia’s most idealistic and decent politicians, a man described by his old boss and rival Gough Whitlam as ‘noble’. Jim Cairns was not perfect, and his imperfections included a capacity to lie in public, as the Junie Morosi saga showed, but for a politician he was incredibly straight. It seems to […]

As Graham points out, politics is everywhere, even on reality TV. However, the politics of reality TV goes far beyond who’ll win Oz Idol or who gets kicked out of Big Brother. The politics of reality TV is mostly about what the politics of TV and more broadly the mass media has always been about […]

One reason why I think the global warming theorists are probably right is the way weather patterns are changing here in Perth. Here it is, still only early November, and it is going to be 39 today and forecast 40 for tomorrow. 40 would be a new record. We know that rain fall is declining […]

Where’s Ron Boswell when you need him? Is he the only Nat who understands Pauline Hanson is their predator?

Politics is everywhere, and politics is entertainment, especially on reality TV. Take Australian Idol. The lobbying has begun in such earnest that even the On Line Opinions email forum has been subjected to spam

Right-wing populist parties have grown up all over the developed world, supposedly a response to the social and political upheaval generated by globalisation. However, although they usually embody anti-imigration and sometimes outright racist attitudes as well as many of the typical trappings of far right politics (pro-nationalism and militarism, authoritarian on social problems), they also […]