Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category Australia

  • Pledge

    THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY has an extraordinarily strict code of behaviour relating to membership, and an elaborate mythology relating to its rats throughout history. The great crime is to be elected as a member of the ALP and then, having benefited from the collective efforts of the whole, to go back on your pledge; it's related to the similar---but very different---great taboo that operates amongst trade unionists for people who cross picket lines. The Labor rat is a cultural hate object, and something like the prodigal son, they're generally more famous than the well-behaved. Mal Colston will live on in notoriety, Billy Hughes will always be loathed. Who remembers the loyal?

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  • The blue dot

    JAMES VINCENT WROTE IN the LRB about the meaning shifts behind the cardinal points.

    Brotton ends his survey by noting the year the reign of the compass finally expired: 2008, which saw the launch of the iPhone and the creation of the blue dot, the constant marker in map apps by which we now orient ourselves. ‘In this our digitised century,’ Brotton writes, ‘there are now five directions – north, south, east, west, and the online blue dot: “You”.’ Paper maps have given way to the dot, which is now ‘pre-eminent, superseding compass directions which, for many, become irrelevant. Eyes glued to that jerky little blue ball, we spend less and less travel time observing the physical terrain through which we move.’

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  • Managers

    THE LONG AWAITED AMERICAN tariffs are announced. They promise to be as catastrophic for the largest economy in the world, whose currency is the global reserve, as anyone had predicted. 'The Markets' as at the time of writing are responding, also, predictably, but as though they could not quite have believed that a politician who made repeated statements that he would do a thing, is on record over decades supporting a thing, once in a position to do the thing, would do the thing. Who'd have thought?

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  • Lizard

    COOKING WHEN CAMPING INTRODUCES certain challenges. You're away from your usual kitchen, you have to improvise with less, it's hot or cold or maybe rainy, you have to manage a fire, and every now and then, if you're in Australia, a large lace monitor will wander through like the bully of the town, to a Morricone whistle. (You'll have to provide the ocarina yourself).

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  • Fifty grand

    ARTS DEGREES AT AUSTRALIAN universities are predicted to cost more than fifty thousand dollars:

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  • State Parties

    THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS released its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill and it's not very good, and can't really work. But that's not what interests me about it. That this bit of legislation has been such a prominent part of the government agenda is, I think, a sign of a move away from Labor's role as a State party.

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  • Kingsmillism

    FRAN KELLY IS TO return to the airwaves at Radio National after having, three years ago, retired. She will replace Sarah Macdonald. Edit: she will present a new 6pm program. This is our media labour economy in a nutshell; absolutely dominated by three or four major institutions (the ABC, Nine-Fairfax, and the Murdoch papers) which combine to form what is effectively a cartel for media, and within that, explicitly hostile to young people and new entrants.

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  • Prices

    WE ARE ALL THATCHERITES in 2024. Neoliberalism may be on its way out in favour of a new mercantilist order, but the fundamental concept-order behind how we structure States remains. Ministers are the custodians of legislation, and of budgets, and of the administrative/regulatory state, and those three levers are all they have. Outside the State lies the market, the working of which determines prices and conditions. Simple dichotomy: on one side the rule of human laws, on the other side the rule of economic laws; a divide that makes sense so long as you don't know what economics is.

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  • The art of politics

    THE WIRE TAPS THAT captured conversations between Daryl Maguire and Gladys Berejiklian were extraordinary. At various points, Maguire complained about the Icac’s powers, warned Berejiklian they could be listening in on their conversations, and said the watchdog was “marginalising the art of politics”.

    This is actually right.

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  • Camping

    ‘CAMPING’, THE ACT OF leaving one’s house to sleep outdoors, for the sole purpose of recreation, is a very recent thing in human history, that nobody did before the Victorian era. It’s associated with the late 19th century development of cities and the anti-urbanism that is part of ‘modernity’, that grab-bag of new attitudes to living as an industrial species. I enjoy the irony that I, a professional old building noticer, really enjoy it.

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