Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was born in New South Wales and is an international expert in Islamic Studies, currently working at the University of Melbourne. She was arrested at Tehran airport in August 2018, and was subsequently convicted of espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison at a secret trial. Her arbitrary detention by the Iranian regime is a grave miscarriage of justice, and an assault on academic freedom and the ability for scholars to conduct independent research.

In reflecting on the campaign and result, I want to make some initial observations of whether there are continuing expressions of anti-politics in Australia. It is important to reflect on whether my original thesis of anti-politics holds up, and if it does how it might need to be refined in light of the past weekend.

There’s something quaint and precious about this beginning – the huge grins on the players’ faces as they run out, the excitement of the fans, and the homegrown, back-to-basics, good-old-days feeling of walking into a suburban footy ground to stand on the terraces and watch the match. It’s not only the presence of the women players. In the opening season we have seen female field umpires officiating matches, watched Bec Goddard coaching Adelaide, and been introduced to many women sports reporters and commentators.

This has started well – 2000 words of notes in three hours since I have arrived. I go downstairs at 6 pm to sit in front of an open fire and meet the four other writers staying at Vauna this week – Isabelle, Peter, Joshua and Helen. Jansis, the CEO, details the history of the Writers’ House and I recall details of Eleanor Dark’s life from Drusilla Modjeska’s book Exiles at Home. I read it a lifetime ago, before all this ‘political economy’ business.

But in November 1999, a watershed moment occurred in the heart of world capitalism – on the streets of Seattle, in the United States – when Teamster unionists, environmentalists dressed as Turtles and many others joined forces to dispute that there was no alternative. Their target was the World Trade Organisation meeting, which was negotiating a new round of free trade agreements, and their blockades of the venue and mass rallies shut it down.

It is no accident that Indigenous people are stigmatised through income management. It is no accident that thousands sit in refugee camps just off our borders. It is no accident that government benefits are so low people cannot pay rent and buy food ...

Govt confirms they have sent women and children refugees overnight to the detention camps in Manus Island indefinitely. Shameful. – Senator Sarah-Hanson Young on Twitter, 21 November 2012

In addition to shopping centres, Australian universities are increasingly contracting out work like cleaning and security. These are roles that were previously subject to the same enterprise agreements as the library staff or school administrators, who had comparatively good conditions because of long-term union gains, but are now contracted to companies that must win tenders through bidding the lowest cost.

When the proposal first came I was flustered. Although we had been living together for six years, we had never discussed getting married. I’d also never really pictured myself involved in a wedding ceremony, which had always seemed too bizarrely steeped in sexist traditions of white dresses and fathers giving daughters away to other men.

On 16 May 2012 there was a reunion at the Australian Council of Trade Unions congress gala dinner. The crucial players involved in the development of the ACTU and ALP Prices and Incomes Accord of the 1980s – and Bill Kelty, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Laurie Carmichael – were all there. The keynote addresses were from Kelty and Keating, with the latter asked to commemorate the former’s work in the labour movement.

One of the founders of the German Greens, Jutta Ditfurth, left her party in the early 1990s. She formulated the expression ‘neoliberals on bikes’ to highlight that the German Greens did not stand in opposition to the destructive and inequitable logic of laissez faire capitalism – in fact, they were often embracing of it.

As the weekend drew to a close in Europe and the Middle East, results of the Greek and Egyptian elections were becoming known. Both countries have seen a revival in progressive struggle and mass action on the streets over the last few years, and yet in both elections conservative forces appear to be the victors. At least for now.

Slavery. It was a bad thing that happened somewhere else, in the United States or elsewhere. Or so we are told.

In high school my English teacher gave advanced reading to students who were keen, and the first novel was To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s book is a story of racism in the American South, as everyone knows, but it also included a salutary lesson about gender for me.

‘She won’t be right mate’ – sign at Occupy Melbourne 2011 was a year of unexpected protests, revolts and revolutions. Demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt toppled dictators, while thousands camped in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya as part of the Indignados movement. The Occupy Everywhere movement, which began with Adbusters’ modest […]

Your terrorists/Our lone wolves: Anders Breivik, Utøya and the misconstruction of murder. It’s been three months since right-wing writer and activist Anders Breivik slaughtered nearly 70 young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island – enough time to begin to assess that horrific act’s meaning in a era when a European hard Right […]

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has seen TV outlets promo tribute after tribute, where the message is clear: the tragedy of the twin towers requires of us an uncritical outpouring of grief. The now ten years old footage, which has been replayed so very many times, is still raw and powerful: people jumping from burning […]

BOGAN (Wikipedia): The term bogan is Australian slang, usually pejorative or self-deprecating, for an individual who is recognised to be from a lower class background or someone whose limited education, speech, clothing, attitude and behaviour exemplifies such a background. As the UK riots unfolded, commentary in both the mainstream media and on the Left highlighted […]

One Dimensional Woman is Nina Power’s 69-page treatise and call to arms, articulately railing against contemporary portrayals of women. Power’s anger is at the narrow confines within which women must locate themselves, and the ‘trademarking’ of feminism for a range of projects that are harmful rather than liberatory. Acutely sharp in places, and humorous in […]

A fortnight ago Bobbi Sykes died. When I read the news, I was stilled by sorrow for and about someone I have never met. I am not a practiced obituary writer, nor am I an ‘expert’ on Aboriginal poetry. I write this post because the girl of 18 who first read Sykes’ poems, as an […]

Ten years ago today, at 6 am in the morning, I was sheltering from rain at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. The Victorian government had built an enormous fence to stop protesters from disrupting the Asia Pacific Summit of the World Economic Forum, which had strolled into town to hold what Alexander Downer termed a […]