Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Joel Deane

Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist and poet. He has worked in newspapers, television, politics, and internet startups in Australia and the United States. His latest novel is Judas Boys (Hunter, 2023).

Joel Deane reviews 'Punch and Judy: The double disillusion election of 2010' by Mungo MacCallum

November 2010, no. 326 01 November 2010
The 2010 federal election fell on my wife’s birthday: 21 August. Being political tragics, we didn’t stop for birthday cake. Instead, we handed out roughly 1600 how-to-vote cards for the Australian Labor Party in suburban Melbourne. Our local polling booth is the Vista Valley Kindergarten, in Bulleen. This kindergarten cum polling booth, which sits in more of a gully than a valley and offers no ... (read more)

‘A bomb in every download: Julian Assange against the world’ by Joel Deane

May 2011, no. 331 27 April 2011
On 30 July 2010, WikiLeaks uploaded a file named ‘insurance.aes256’ to the Internet. The file was 1.4 gigabytes in size – large enough to hold a mountain of leaked documents – and encrypted with a 256-character key strong enough to have the US National Security Agency’s approval for use to secure classified documents. It was also copied to dozens of USB sticks and mailed out to a cadre o ... (read more)

Joel Deane reviews 'The Art of Great Speeches and Why We Remember Them' by Dennis Glover

March 2011, no. 329 14 April 2011
At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. So said President Barack Obama at a m ... (read more)

Joel Deane reviews 'Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era' (Quarterly Essay 40) by George Megalogenis and 'The Party Thieves: The Real Story of the 2010 Election' by Barrie Cassidy

December 2010–January 2011, no. 327 30 November 2010
Political writers are much like their sports-writing cousins. Most simply tell it as they see it, recounting the highs and lows of the game, the winners and losers, the statistics and scoreline. Some – courtesy of a flair for language, a well-stocked contacts book, or the perspective that comes from being a former player or a veteran observer – have the ability to place the reader in the goal ... (read more)
Page 3 of 3