Category Politics

• 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

• This Song Shall Be Our Parting Hymn

  THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST red,
  It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
  And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
  Their hearts blood dyed its every fold….

  Jim Connell wrote the song, and gave it to the social democrats and labourists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The British Labourists still sing it; even the Australians still know the words.

  Norwegian kids can’t be that different to the young women and men I spent my twenties arguing with. Like A, I’ve been an earnest teenager in a youth wing of a moderate, labourist, reforming Party. For pleasant and unpleasant times, for all their enthusiasm and compromise and cynicism, they’re my people. And to read the news makes me sick to my heart.

  It well recalls the triumphs past,
  It gives the hope of peace at last;
  The banner bright, the symbol plain,
  Of human rights and human gain.

  Posted 24 July 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• The Conference Chinese Meal

  ON THE WEEKEND OF JULY 9-10, the august sovereign body of the Australian Labor Party (New South Wales Branch), the State Conference, met at the Sydney Town Hall. It’s been a while between drinks, and we were all hoping, I think, for an uneventful two days out. If you’ve never been to one, you’ll have to imagine a cross between an undergraduate debate, a dissenting Protestant worship service, Modern Times, a crowd scene in an Altman movie and Thunderdome. But, you know, in a good way.

  Open microphone, with Johno at the head of the queue

  Posted 12 July 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• The Best And Worst Of Sussex Street

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE AUSTRALIAN Labor Party, NSW Branch, stand at 377 Sussex St, above a bland marble and carpet lobby and, at the time of writing, no outward signage. Unions NSW—which used to go by the nineteenth-century name of “Labor Council”—occupies the back part of the building and parades its workerist murals, its flags, badges and colours, with all the ceremony they deserve, but the political wing goes incognito.

  Posted 20 May 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: The Religious Right, From The Religious Right

  DR GORDON MOYES WAS a member of the upper house of the NSW Parliament from 2003 2002 until the most recent election in March this year. Originally standing with Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats, he broke with his Parliamentary colleague in spectacular fashion and ran unsuccessfully as a Family First candidate. He is very traditional, very conservative, and very religious. When someone like that warns you about extremism on the Right, it’s worth cocking an ear.

  Posted 8 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan