Category Politics

• 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.

  Posted 3 July 2017 | Author Liam Hogan

• 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

  Posted 27 August 2014 | Author Liam Hogan

• 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.

  Posted 17 April 2014 | Author Liam Hogan

• Stock

  FIRST, ROAST A CHICKEN. AFTER you’ve enjoyed the bird (and the roast vegies, and the stuffing, and the gravy, and the etcetera etcetera), you’re left with a carcase and a whole lot of gristle and fatty bits. In the morning, grab a pair of scissors, slice the bones up, simmer them in water for several hours with a couple of small onions, some celery, a carrot or two, thyme, and lots of salt. You weren’t planning on going to work that morning were you? You aren’t too hung over from the very nice white wine you had with the chicken to handle the congealed leftovers before noon? Good. Once it’s all bubbled away, strain it into plastic takeaway containers and put them in the freezer for later.

  

  Posted 2 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan

• Indian Home Diner Butter Chicken

  

  RESPONDING TO PERSISTENT HECKLING, THE Right’s Michelle Rowland, speaking for the amendment, said the most popular last name in her electorate was “Singh” and that for many, the uranium issue was a reason for Indians not to vote Labor. The inner city contingent that favoured the ban was out of touch, she said.
  “Just because you order the butter chicken from Indian Home Diner in Glebe Point Road doesn’t make you an expert.”

  If you didn’t have the privilege of attending the most recent National Conference of the Australian Labor Party as I did, you can take away (ahem) from this quip everything you can possibly need to know about the event.

  Posted 6 December 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Death To The National Media

  THERE IS AN ASSUMPTION THAT TV and radio… provide a means of expression and self-expression for a tiny group addressing a vast multitude. That assumption is no longer technically valid, and it is doubtful whether it ever really was. …
  All the political problems arose with the realisation that the contours of society did not, or did no longer, follow the contours around which the broadcasting institutions had been built.¹

  That’s a description of the destruction of the older institution of broadcasting in the 1970s, from which we got the current landscape of broadcasting and print. The simple problem was that older organisations—like Lord Reith’s BBC in the UK, and the older commercial networks—had been built to service a society the founders imagined as a relatively homogeneous, happy mass, in need of education and communal entertainment everybody could share and enjoy, in a community of shared recognition of mutual meaning. The social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s destroyed that happy illusion and print and broadcasting industries profoundly altered themselves to match the new world: in Australia, we got SBS, campaigning city-based tabloids, vicious and ruthless talkback, the short-lived Nation Review and the greatest still-existing fossil of the era, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian.

  Posted 20 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Political Journalists Two Minutes Hate

  I READ THE NEWSPAPER, AND was infuriated: then I remember that above the level of incoherently muttering to one’s self, on the Maslow Pyramid of Internet Needs, lies the level of futilely declaiming to the void on one’s blog. “You’ve got one of those, remember”—I reminded myself.

  Here’s Peter Brent aka Mumble in (this will become important) The Australian.

  Posted 10 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Correction

  I WILL NOT PESTER YOU with further niceties applicable to the difference between houses of correction, and work-houses, and poor-houses, if any there should be, which are not work-houses; between the different modes of treatment that may be due to what are looked upon as the inferior degrees of dishonesty, to idleness as yet untainted with dishonesty, and to blameless indigence. The law herself has scarcely eyes for these microscopic differences. I bow down, therefore, for the present at least, to the counsel of so many sages, and shrink from the crime of being ‘wiser than the law.’

  That’s Jeremy Bentham, appealing to The Australian’s universal truth, that for every problem, no matter how simple or wicked, there exists a solution: thoroughgoing industrial relations reform.

  Update: No food blogging until further notice. Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep…

  Posted 29 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Lemon Meringue Pie

  I SHARE MY LECTURES IN the Masters course I’m enrolled in with architects, civil engineers, a few property developers, and one or two landscape designers. I’m one of a very small minority, I find, who’ve ever spent any time down in the humanities or social science end of a university—and it’s something of a shock to jump over into the space of the other of The Two Cultures.¹

  Posted 14 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Red Risotto

  THE PREDOMINANCE OF ASSIMILATIONIST CONSTRUCTS… meant that questions about how Australian institutions had responded to an influx of people of non Anglo-Saxon origin simply did not come to the surface. There was no ‘decision’ to rule such questions out of order. They did not arise; they were not ‘confronted’…¹

  That’s your favourite Australian domestic sociologist and mine, Jean Martin, describing non-decisionmaking in action—when something’s simply ruled out of public knowledge as a subject to have ideas about.

  Posted 7 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan