Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Category Politics

  • State Bakery

    ONCE, THE NSW GOVERNMENT tried to run a State Bakery. As readers may know, the Party card of the NSW Labor Party, to which every member signs a pledge, are partially as follows:

    ...I will actively support the Constitution, Platform and Principles of the Australian Labor Party including the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other antisocial features in these fields...

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  • Log off

    HAVING FACEBOOK ARGUMENTS WITH people is generally unpleasant, frustrating, and pointless. You won’t win them, and they only increase the engagement figures of the kind of people who engage marketing consultants, or use the word ‘yarns’ without irony. Arguing on facebook and twitter is why everyone’s racist uncle is in charge of our political parties and civil institutions, jumping into your conversation to say, well, ‘you might not like Trump but he reflects how real people think’, or other infinitely facile opinions that simply cannot be engaged with because there is no ‘there’ there, and people with critical self-reflection skills get off social media, retreat further and further from any sphere that can be called public, and work on their hobbies and addictions.

    The key image of the early 21st century is major corporations shitting in the gemeinschaft.

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  • Lavarch Report

    THE NEW SOUTH WALES Labor Party has released its review document, the Lavarch Report, which recommends some superficial administrative changes to the workings of Head Office in response to decades of carpetbagging behaviour and unprincipled, shameless, grifting on the part of the NSW Right.

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  • Vegemite Bagel

    JOSEPH ROTH'S RADETZSKY MARCH is one of those novels that years ago, someone you know told you was really good, and that you should read it. Whoever gave you the tip was right. It's that good...

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  • Pizza

    PIZZA IS AN ASSEMBLAGE, in the philosophical sense that it is a collection of individually discrete items, brought together and consisting of a unified whole, that can be understood at many levels simultaneously—grouped ingredients and whole-of-dish. It exists as the platonic ideal of a round, baked flatbread with toppings, as a process of putting-together, as the embodied final outcome which is this evening’s dinner, and as mistake: incorrect pizzas with inauthentic aspects make Italians mad. I make dough, I put ingredients on it, I bake it, I photograph it for my neglected blog; at which point has the pizza come into being?

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  • Designing a jail

    IN THE NEW INQUIRY, Monica Mohapatra writes about the uneasy appeal of design thinking to make better prisons. The piece is excellent. Read it.

    Design approaches to jail have recently become appealing to ruling classes because they garner a profit from aesthetic changes that are easily branded as prison reform. Underlying this facade of reform is the fact that architectural improvements serve to make jails more palatable for a future where jails will neighbor more communities...

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  • The years have made me bitter

    THE YEARS HAVE MADE me bitter, the gargle dims my brain
    'cause Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same
    The Pillar and the Met have gone, the Royal long since pulled down
    As the great unyielding concrete makes a city of my town.

    On the 23rd of March, last Saturday, NSW went to a State election and narrowly re-elected its government. The Coalition, unpopular for its performance but with a well-respected leader, faced a Labor Party with an unremarkable campaign and an unknown leader whose comments about Asian demographic change were reported in the last week, to catastrophic effect.

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  • Scab is always taunt

    BETTER PEOPLE THAN YOU or I have fought against shifting displacement. The Green Bans are the well-known heroic story of the beginning of built-environment heritage protection and the last hurrah of working class militancy in Australia. The Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), a union made up of low-skilled demolition and construction workers, made common cause with the interests of preservationists and aesthetes of cultural significance. From the unlikely teaming-up of singletted Communists and connoisseurs of Georgian buildings, NSW retains its Rocks, its Kelly’s Bush, its significant buildings and its Heritage Act 1977.

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  • Carbon Tax Information

    LIKE MANY OTHER AGL customers I’ve recently received a very strange text message:

    AGL estimates average electricity savings of 7.8% off NSW AGL residential bills by removing the carbon tax. See agl.com.au/carbon for details.

    When I queried it, AGL’s twitter account informed me that the law required them to send it:

    @AGLenergy: @liamvhogan Hi Liam - these are courtesy SMSs on upcoming price changes to your account. We're obligated by law to advise you ~Thanks, Matty

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  • Red Red Wine

    IT’S BEEN A DAY for all of the ex-Labor staffers I know to relish. Premier of New South Wales is becoming one of those jobs you just don’t stay in very long, like the Chief Taster to the Sultan, or the coach of an AFL side coming ninth. We kept losing ‘em to the loathsome effects of Parliamentary crooks and it’s hard not to bleakly laugh when our right-wing friends and family complain that ‘he was one of the good ones brought down’. Yeah, aren’t they all.

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