Category Politics

• 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.

  Posted 6 December 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• 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...

  Posted 27 November 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• 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?

  

  Posted 19 November 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm Reading (late August)

  THE AMERICAN AFFAIRS JOURNAL was at least until quite recently a safe haven for political ideas of the American conservative-establishment Right and was ambivalent, at best, about the election of Donald Trump. It smells of cigars, well-heated offices, and careers full of sinecures.

  A pair of articles in its most recent edition, though, show the kind of sharp swing to the left normally associated with a football winger, stepping inside a defender to pass. The italics are mine:

  The Financialisation Of The American Elite:

  Many structural reforms are necessary to change this. With regard to education, it is time to reform the top MBA programs. These schools shape our business culture, and, in so doing, exert an outsized influence on the business practices and the career pursuits of some of our most talented young people.
  The schools should begin with an explicit renunciation of share­holder capitalism. This will be the easy part.

  The New Gilded Age Or Old Normal:

  The longer-term trend toward more inequality in capitalist economies, which prevailed before this period, has re­sumed after it. That leads us to conclude that there may well be no technocratic or tax policy fix for capitalism’s tendency to generate ever more inequality. This conclusion is obviously less optimistic than the one reached by Thomas Piketty in his seminal 2014 study of income inequality, which argues for ameliorating income share out­comes by raising taxes on the rich.

  Irving Kristol, the neoconservative, famously described the turn of his intellectual life as that of a ‘liberal mugged by reality’. Read closely and there’s a lot more mugging going on.

  Posted 21 August 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• 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...

  Posted 28 March 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• 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.

  Posted 25 March 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• 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