© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Australia

Read more about the article Hitting Uncle Rupert where it hurts

Hitting Uncle Rupert where it hurts

Kevin Rudd is my favourite living former prime minister of Australia. I quite liked him as actual PM, and was sorry when he was smashed out of office by a coalition of big mining companies and the powerful trade unions that didn’t like his plan to make Labor a more broad-based party (my opinion, that). I was always dubious about those alleged internal ALP polls that claimed his popularity had plummeted and which formed the basis of the coup that replaced him with Julia Gillard. As journalist Alan Ramsay wrote back then, Labor destroyed two prime…

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Read more about the article Front line of the new cold war
World War 2 Australian propaganda poster

Front line of the new cold war

For Australia, “the yellow peril” has always been a defining factor in nationhood. It didn’t take long, after white colonisers arrived on the great southern continent, for fears of the “Asiatic hordes” to take root and grow. Being an English colony on Asia’s doorstep explains it, of course. And hence the anti-Chinese sentiment in the Gold Rush days, the anti-Asian-labour sentiments that ebbed and flowed over decades, the White Australia Policy and Britain’s calculated use of colonial fears of Japanese invasion to induce Australia to raise an army just in time for the slaughter of The…

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Read more about the article Shame about democracy . . .
Not ashamed of much. Australian PM Scott Morrison (photo by Kristy Robinson) and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian

Shame about democracy . . .

Somebody wrote a few weeks ago how shocked many Americans had been to realise that shame was the only thing that had been protecting them from political tyranny. The writer meant that the only reason, until now, that no US president or political party had pulled the stunt of stacking the Supreme Court with a last-minute appointment, as Donald Trump has done, was that they feared the shame it would bring on them. Same with all the voter-suppression dodges the Republican Party pulled out of the hat this year. While voter-suppression isn’t new in the USA,…

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