Politics
The New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself by Peter R. Neumann, translated by David Shaw
The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.
... (read more)Last year I turned eighty. Vacillating between denial and celebration, I decided, with some trepidation, on the latter. It was thirty years since I had last had a big birthday party: this one needed to be special. I consoled myself that, old as I am, I am still younger than the president of the United States, Mick Jagger, and the pope.
... (read more)The Menzies Watershed edited by Zachary Gorman & Menzies versus Evatt by Anne Henderson
The Penitent State: Exposure, mourning, and the biopolitics of national healing by Paul Muldoon
Late Fascism: Race, capitalism and the politics of crisis by Alberto Toscano
Well-informed debate on national security, never more important than now, depends on reliable accounts of historical episodes, ones not distorted by latter-day political or diplomatic sensitivities. For more than a century, Australians have benefited from a tradition of official histories of the nation’s involvement in conflicts and peacekeeping operations, for which governments of all persuasions have given independent historians access to all relevant official records, publishing their works without political or diplomatic censorship.
... (read more)