Category Politics

• Courtiers

  WHEN HE WAS MINISTER for Immigration (1972—1974), ‘Al’ Grassby had one dedicated staffer to assist him in his portfolio duties, and that was a secretary-receptionist-typist. How things change. In the last few decades, and at an accelerating rate, the numbers of unelected ‘staffers’ attached to Ministers, as well as electorate staff, has massively increased in Australian Parliaments. We are now at the point where the working and social world of staffers form their own societies attached to State Governments and the Federal Government in Canberra, an opaque one, closed to outsiders, self-regarding and self-contained, but with enormous importance for its effects on the rest of us. And as was shown in Monday’s Four Corners episode, it behaves, when it thinks it thinks it can’t be seen, with genuinely disgusting misogyny and self-entitlement.

  Posted 12 November 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• The elite's many virtues

  I AM READING DANIEL Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap, which is very good, compelling, and is crystallising thoughts on human merit I’ve been recently having. It’s a fairly compelling argument that the reproduction of the ruling class, today, happens at the level of transferring skills and educational training, and through elites exploiting their own labour, of specific kinds which create value in the context of our times (financial services, law, business, technology, and so on). It’s slightly less compelling in the Australian context, where the older forms—your parents buying you a house in Sydney—still work fine. Yes, I’ve been saying to myself as I turn the virtual pages of my e-reader, yes, that observation relates to the way I see the world. Yes, that is the way the ideology works. The book happens, as I happen to be, caustically enduringly angry.

  And then the challenge:

  Posted 15 September 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• In praise of corruption

  WE VIEW CORRUPTION IN public office as, generally, a bad thing. When a politician or official takes [what looks like] a bribe, we expect them to be punished. On its face, corruption of public processes breaks our norms against fairness, because we expect the State to evaluate things—policies, projects, people—on the basis of equality, and natural justice, not whose brown paper bag was heaviest. But I want to praise corruption, not bury it.

  Posted 10 September 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Plants

  BOTH THE SCIENCES AND political conservatism tend towards interpreting the world in terms of iron law, and the principle that there is a way things naturally are that can be discovered through inquiry. That's in contrast to the alternative, more humanistic tradition, in which theoretical models have utility for explaining things, until they don't, at which point the honest thinker throws it away and makes a new model. Neither are intrinsically good or bad; the first tends towards stubborn stuffiness, the second towards fashion and cliques, but they're just approaches. Let me propose, in the first tradition, an Iron Natural Law of my own:

  Posted 2 September 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Agoraphobia

  LIKE MOST I WAS impressed and awed at the crowds who attended protests against Aboriginal deaths in custody this weekend. It's all I can do to walk on the footpath on the way to work. If you'd asked me on New Years Eve what challenges I'd be taking on this year, I wouldn't have picked agoraphobia, but here I am, and here we all are, walking backwards away from people, trying to avoid our bosses who like handshaking and slapping people on the back. I can only admire the fortitude of tens of thousands of people facing that, as well as the prospect of arrest, capsicum spray, and a beating. I can only groan as, completely predictably, the protesters' good faith in marching is seized on in bad faith by hoteliers, wedding planners, and other people interested in getting a profit.

  Posted 9 June 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Zombies

  IT IS NO WONDER that zombies are such a fixture of the horror genre. To be reanimated after one's own death, both with and without the key elements of your identity, treated as a less-than-human shambling artefact and played either for revulsion or comedy---what could be more terrifying? If there is one constant in zombie stories, it's the fundamental indignity of the afterlife: their shambling, angry peacelessness. The zombies naturally want to eat or kill the living, and it's never really a surprise that they should want to. In the first reel of the film, it's always the present that calls upon the dead; a spell, perhaps, or a toxic gas, but the present is always being haunted by the past, and unable to understand its own culpability, without context, or deal with the consequences. If you aren't scared of your own identity becoming reanimated after your death, and used by selfish characters to further a plot-line not of your choosing, maybe you don't have enough imagination.

  Posted 18 May 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• What kind of grubs

  ALAN JONES HAS ANNOUNCED his planned retirement and with his exit from our politics, both NSW and Australia will be a little bit better, a little bit cleaner, a little bit less self-satisfiedly hateful. You will read members of Parliament, celebrities, other members of the press, eulogising his career, paying tribute to a public man, or most predictably of all, describing him as complicated or ambiguous. It's all garbage. The man was uncomplicatedly, straightforwardly, the worst and most toxic public figure of Australia's last half-decade. Our political and cultural life will be better for his absence.

  Posted 12 May 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Carry the love from town to town

  IT’S A UNIVERSAL HABIT in every era in every culture to express communal desire, keep solidarity, and drive individual courage, in music. Few of the songs I am used to humming and singing to myself are appropriate today: every one seems to call people to gather or come together. It isn’t physical courage we’re required in these times to show anyway, but social distancing demands moral, psychological, and even spiritual courage. We are each of us for the near future in our own prison of the self, but freedom is coming.

  Keep Your Eyes On The Prize was one of the key songs of the United States’ civil rights movement in the post-WWII. Like us, they knew things would get worse before they got better. Like us, they knew that patience is impossibly hard. Like us, they could see a different, better world at the end of the journey.

  Paul and Silas thought they was lost
  Dungeon shook and the chains come off
  Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

  Freedom’s name is mighty sweet
  And soon we’re gonna meet
  Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

  …The only chain that a man can stand
  Is that chain of hand on hand
  Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

  Posted 23 March 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Clerical companionship

  EDWARD LUTTWAK IN 1994 wrote a completely prescient article, dunking (in contemporary terms) on Francis Fukuyma. (It is pointed to by Ferdinand Mount in the most recent edition, writing about Brexit). It is exactly as startling as Mount says it is to recognise one’s own times in a two-decades old article; it is depressing to realise that job insecurity, the fundamental working condition of everyone in 2020, still has no meaningful-realistic political answer, on the political left or right. The most confronting sentence for me though, in the 26 year old article was the strange, aside, mention of a bit of workplace culture long forgotten:

  Posted 14 February 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Delusion

  THE NSW CIVIL AND Administrative Tribunal, which rules on the correctness of decisions made in some lower decision-making bodies, was asked to decide whether a ‘Qanon’ blog, run by a psychiatrist, was itself evidence of mental impairment, for the purposes of deregistration. It decided it was, and with the—extremely, as they say, wild—other behaviours, upheld the decision. ‘Qanon’, for the uninitiated, is an umbrella-term for a set of far-right conspiracy theories largely to do with imagined opponents of President Trump, and range from the banal, to the tediously anti-semitic, to the truly, literarily, strange.

  I am personally fascinated by the question of delusions, and where they can be drawn as separate to merely unusual political or religious beliefs. I don’t think it’s possible to easily identify one from the other, at least not permanently. N Hennessy ADCJ, obiter dicta:

  Posted 5 February 2020 | Author Liam Hogan