Category Archives: politics and current affairs

Review – The Good Fight: What does Labor stand for?

02 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by in book review, John Curtin, politics and current affairs

≈ 4 Comments

What a treasure Quarterly Essay is. Great Australian essayists engaging with politics and culture in style. The 100th quarterly essay is by Sean Kelly, who wrote my favourite book about Australian politics, The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison. In this new book, The Good Fight: What does Labor stand for? he is engaging with an ally, Anthony Albanese, and I can imagine the anguish as an insider turned freelance writer must say the hard things. As always, Kelly brings a literary sensibility, starting with Kafka and ending with Ferrante.

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Kim E. Beazley: Father of the House

05 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in book review, John Curtin, memoirs, politics and current affairs

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When Kim E. Beazley (father of the Labor leader) died in 2007, he left behind the manuscript of a memoir, Father of the House. It was published posthumously by Fremantle Press in 2009, edited by the wonderful Janet Blagg, who also worked on my first book. Beazley emerges in the pages of this memoir as a principled politician, and an uneasy Laborite. He succeeded John Curtin as the federal member for Fremantle after Curtin’s death in 1945; he was only 26 and he was to remain in parliament though the entire winter of opposition for Labor from 1949 to 1972, before finally retiring in 1977.

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The turning point?

07 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in climate change, politics and current affairs

≈ 12 Comments

It seems wrong, as a supposed writer, to be silent about the bushfire crisis. I haven’t even written anything in my diary about it. It’s like someone living through the opening days of a terrible war and not remarking on it. But like so many Australians, I’ve been following compulsively. Through Twitter in my case, the feed refreshing to show photos out of Mallacoota as the sky turned red and then black, and tears came into my eyes at the thought of those thousands on the beach and in the hall as they waited for the end of the world.

The compulsion has also been because I thought that this, finally, had to be the turning point. This was when Australians woke from our complacent sleepwalk into climate change. This was when we realised what a hotter world was going to be like. But someone tweeted weeks ago that climate action is to Australia like gun control is to America. And sure enough, the fossil fuel industry, the Murdoch empire, the LNP, and the other climate deniers are trying to fool us again, to take us away from the moment we could demand real action.

Australia, don’t be fooled. Listen to the science. Get out on the streets, demand change.

Flood the city: notes from a nervous Perth climate protestor

12 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by in autobiographical, politics and current affairs

≈ 9 Comments

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I was one of those despicable climate protestors blocking the Perth CBD yesterday. I hate inconveniencing people, but this is an emergency. I was feeling dread in the days leading up to the protest. For security reasons, there weren’t many details given out to rank-and-file protestors like me about what we were going to do. And you never know how the police are going to act. They can be fair and respectful to protestors or they can play hardball and be unpredictable. And who was going to look after the kids if we both got arrested? Continue reading →

Perth School Strike For Climate: notes from the middle of the crowd

23 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in autobiographical, politics and current affairs

≈ 7 Comments

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It was humbling to be led by school students, born this century, in the Global Climate Strike on Friday. But also inspiring. The turnout in Perth was estimated at 10,000, and Forrest Place was filled to the brim. Even this impressive turnout was overtaken by smaller cities, Hobart and Canberra, but that’s just a sign of how big this day was, how many people are concerned enough to make a stand. Continue reading →

This is why we can’t have nice things

19 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in poetry, politics and current affairs, Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

i.

Shorten conceding. He speaks in waves
And says the right words
Politicians have bigger selves than me
I’m only watching by accident
Having sworn off all politics a couple of hours ago
For years it’s taxed my time
And left me with a dry mouthful of shit

ii.

How many times do I learn the same lesson?
Salesmanship trumps substance

These are the things Australians choose:
Reality TV, franchise shopping, tabloid media, property speculation, the Liberal Party.

To be prime minister you need slogans and photo ops
You don’t need to answer questions
You don’t need policies
You don’t need to try to save the world
Let’s just carry on to hell as we were

iii.

Today I’ll turn off the news forever.
Today, tell me if you voted Liberal
So I can unfriend you and never speak to you again.
Today I’m retreating to aesthetics
I’ll look at paintings from long ago
And live for myself, it’s the Australian way now.
Today we’ll sell the house and go self-sufficient in Balingup.
Today we’ll gird our loins and replenish the armoury,
Planting seeds in the backyard with the kids
And saying you have to keep hoping no matter what.

 

 

The 28th, 29th, and 30th prime ministers: a memoir

24 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by in autobiographical, politics and current affairs, Series: Saturday 10am

≈ 7 Comments

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Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, September 2013.

The day Tony Abbott became prime minister we were in Lauterbrunnen, a town in the Swiss Alps, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. For the second night, we were eating at a restaurant run by an Australian. He was jubilant about the result. I was quiet, melancholic, and suddenly unhappy to be in his restaurant, sitting outside in the dusk. He was going on about the mess the ALP had made of things and I couldn’t possibly be sorry to see that over. I was sorry, sorry it hadn’t worked out better, sorry for the tragedy set off by Rudd’s character flaws. But the ALP wasn’t my party and I made no more than a cryptic suggestion to him that it was complicated for us; if he thought Abbott was a good idea, there was no point telling him how far left we’d voted. We went to a different restaurant the last night in Lauterbrunnen, even though his food had been good. Continue reading →

Anger and Love by Justina Williams

02 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's associates and connections, memoirs, politics and current affairs, Series: Saturday 10am, Western Australia

≈ 12 Comments

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Autobiography is an impossible genre. Memoir is easier – the writer is allowed to present an aspect of their life, to create a story out of one of its strands or seasons. Autobiography has to try to include them all. The desire to remember and record names, dates, and places is in the tension with the need to craft a narrative. And different phases of life require quite different types of writing which might not go together. The problems of autobiography are on show in Justina Williams’ Anger and Love (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993), but it’s an important, fascinating text. Continue reading →

A letter to my MP

27 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in politics and current affairs, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

To my dear member of parliament,

I am very concerned by your government’s move to drug testing for welfare recipients. In 2003 when I graduated from university, I was on Newstart allowance for six months while I looked for work and I found dealing with Centrelink alienating and dehumanising. The attitude of the system toward welfare recipients already feels so harsh. I wasn’t on any drugs but the addition of testing would have increased my sense of disillusionment with a state which treated me with suspicion and heavy-handedness.

I can’t believe this measure comes the same week Tony Abbott admits to being too drunk to vote in a crucial bill. It feels to me that your government risks seeming hypocritical. I’m not convinced this measure is actually concerned with helping people with addiction problems – if this is your real concern, increase funding for addiction services.

Yours sincerely, Nathan Hobby.

I didn’t remind my MP of the fact that he was caught drink-driving without a licence two years ago. I don’t know why this testing measure bothers me so much, but it seems just a little fascist and also yet another move of a government which despises the underclass. There are no jobs for people to be getting at the moment. There are actually so many activities / classes of people who receive subsidies or concessions from the government – as someone tweeted, why aren’t the negative gearers being tested for drugs?