Overland literary journal

Progressive culture since 1954

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Loudspeaker

Warrior making and Anzac Day

On Saturday 27 April, the Canberra Times published an article entitled ‘Push to add soldier to honour roll despite “objections”’. Two days earlier, 35,000 people attended the dawn service at the Australian War Memorial, with other ceremonies around Australia reporting larger crowds than the previous three or four years.

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Loudspeaker

Clive Palmer and the plutocratic impulse

Ross Perot ran a one-man party, based on his software fortune, in 1992, thus ensuring the election of Bill Clinton. More recently, billionaire financial services broadcaster, Michael Bloomberg simply bought the mayoralty of New York with a massive outspend of his opponent, while Vegas property developer and ultra-zionist Shelton Adelson pumped tens of millions into the one-man crusade of Newt Gingrich (in return, Gingrich’s speeches would veer alarmingly from the structural economic problems of the US to a demand that the country’s Israeli embassy be moved to Jerusalem).

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Garibaldi's Statue

A modest step forward

When I applied to become a resident ahead of moving to New Zealand, in 1997, I did it under the ‘de-facto partner of a citizen’ category. Since my partner happened to be a woman, the requirement was for us to have been together for at least two years, which we had to scrupulously document. Had my partner been a man, it would have been four years.

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Loudspeaker

Bombs only kill on planet America

More than a decade has passed since the September 11 attacks occurred and the subsequent War on Terror was launched. In that time, 12 sovereign nations have been subject to military invasion or interference, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and injured and millions displaced, and an unprecedented amount of laws have been proliferated radically expanding state and police powers, including intense surveillance of communities and zones of exception such as Guantanamo Bay – all of which have become disturbingly normalised.

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Loudspeaker

The US and social war

At time of writing there’s still no further information on either the Boston marathon bombing, or the Texas fertiliser plant explosion (yet another C and W song title in waiting) and it would be foolish to build a firm case on ‘what-ifs’.

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Loudspeaker

When social and punitive justice intersect

Sex discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick recently called for tougher sentencing of people convicted of intimate partner violence. She argues incidents of partner violence should not be treated as ‘just a domestic’ but should attract ‘a premium penalty’. Broderick is not alone. Her more punitive approach parallels similar calls from feminist writer Clementine Ford.

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