Ok, ok. It’s not as if the world really *needs* another hot politics take or anything and more to the point I doubt there’s anyone out there to even *read* this blog, gathering dust as it is in this neglected corner of the web, but apropos of nothing in particular and really just for my own benefit here, dear god it’s been depressing watching the absolute state of British politics unfold during this election campaign.…
We heard them before we saw them. We were cutting through Parliament Gardens on our way to the city when we heard the muffled sound of a loudspeaker. “Is that the Grand Prix?” I wondered aloud to Sal. A reasonable assumption I thought, given that the bee swarm like buzz of the cars whizzing around Albert Park had been clearly audible across much of inner Melbourne for the last few days. But as we turned…
So in the end this most predictable of federal elections played out just about the way everyone said it would. I know I live in a bubble of latte-sipping inner city hipsters, and this is a big old country with lots of odd people in it, but at times the election seemed to be taking place in a parallel universe. There was a bit at the start where they just talked about boat people over…
I just scraped in. Tomorrow I become an Australian citizen and — thanks to the special provisions that allow new citizens to provisionally enrol to vote — on Saturday I’ll get to exercise my civic duty in the 2013 Australian Federal Election. I’m taking this seriously, even if I might just be in it for the sausages. I’ve studied the advice from Dennis the Election Koala, I’ve read the only real guide to the election…
I know I shouldn’t expect people to, like, know stuff any more and I know it doesn’t really matter, but I post this here because: 1. I can’t believe that I seem to be the only person in the world who has noticed; and 2. It’s not often that that English degree I spent three years studying for comes in handy. According to the story on the front page of today’s The Age, and apparently…
When I saw this ad on the TV earlier this evening, my first thought was that the “Alliance of Australian Retailers” (seen here campaigning against the Australian Labor government’s proposed introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes) would almost certainly turn out to be a front for some tobacco company… …and of course it is, as The Age confirms (BAT, Philip Morris and Imperial, to be precise). But then I went to their website, to read…
I love a bit of politics, me. And normally I love elections. Give me a bit of round-the-clock, through-the-night, staying-with-it-till-the-results-are-in Dimbleby and I just can’t get enough of that coverage. I’ve stayed up through the night to watch the US elections unfolding before, and I happily had the BBC coverage running in the background at work as the results came in in the UK back in May. But something about my first Aussie election left…
An absolute pleasure, last night, while flicking through the small selection of terrestrial channels we have to choose from here in Australia, past the uninspiring Oscars coverage and dull US drama imports, to stumble across Richard Dawkins on Q and A, the ABC’s local version of Question Time. If you watch this clip from the start of the show, you may be struck as I was by the gulf between Dawkins and the rest of…