There is a false opposition drawn in many conversations between what is supposedly traditional or ‘core’ Left thinking and these tricky new-fangled ideas about privilege and intersectionality. But the best parts of the Left have always been founded on self-determination, on oppressed peoples’ naming of struggles and speaking truth to power. Nothing about this is new. It’s not additional or peripheral.

In 2013, the Australian poetry scene was rocked by a number of high-profile instances of plagiarism. The poet Ira Lightman, who unmasked several perpetrators, debates the underlying issues with poet and critic Anthony Hayes.

Can writers tell another’s stories? Or, more accurately, should they tell another’s story? A debate between Peter Polites and Stephanie Convery. Peter Polites: On one occasion, Sweatshop director Michael Mohammed Ahmad and I were having dinner at Volcanos. Sweatshop is a critical literacy movement that works within the western suburbs of Sydney. Volcanos is a steakhouse, and its customer base is the Arabic-speaking communities of Bankstown.

Should freelance writers be organising? If so, how?

Without doubt, the porn question has, since the 1970s, been the most controversial and divisive issue in the women’s movement.

Robert Lukins’ argument is redolent with over-sentimental symbolism, jargon of motivational speaking, discourse of self-help culture and PR clichés.

Ali Alizadeh makes the case that bringing poetry into the mainstream is incompatible with excellence in the art form, that it would turn poetry into a degraded commodity, that the mainstream is a wholly horrid and irredeemable thing. On these points I disagree.

According to the AP website, the organisation’s primary aim is to ‘promote excellence in Australian poetry’. If so, AP should desist from further bringing poetry into the so-called mainstream.

Looking out the window of a tram, I saw a girl sitting on the front steps of a block of grey-brick units. She looked about thirteen and was crying with abandon. Her face was red and she had what might have been blue ink smudged across her arms and cheeks.

Earlier this year, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced plans for a porn site intended to highlight animal cruelty. Overland asked Katrina Fox and Stephanie Honor Convery for their thoughts on the relationship between sexualised imagery and political advocacy.

Janet Afary and Kevin B Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, p. 206.

Michael Brull makes two key claims that lead him to confusing issues of principle and strategy for a Left forced to deal with political Islam’s influence. First, he argues that while ‘[p]olitical Islam can take many different forms’, it is not anti-imperialism, it is not feminism, and it is not socialism – and he backs this with examples of reactionary policies and betrayals by various Islamist formations.

The wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world represents a sharp break from almost a decade of defensive struggle against triumphant neoliberalism and neo--conservatism. Philosopher Peter Hallward calls it an opportunity to break the pattern of TINA (the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ to the relentless assault by ruling elites on their peoples), while Slavoj Žižek celebrates the revolution’s appeal to the ‘eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity’.34

Perhaps the most astonishing thing in Tietze’s essay is his dismissal of ‘a naïve adherence to secularism as a progressive force in the modern world’. It reminds me of Emma Goldman’s meeting with Lenin, during which he informed her that ‘free speech … is, of course, a bourgeois notion’.

The Left should be firmly and unapologetically secularist. The Left, rightly in my view, has historically stood for classical Enlightenment values of rationalism. We should support people thinking for themselves, rather than believing in irrational and empirically dubious dogmas. We should support people challenging undeserving authorities, rather than offering them deference or outright obedience.

Long before population became a public issue, debate had been stirring behind the scenes. There had been internal arguments within the environmental movement, with tension between those who recognised population as one of the three drivers of environmental damage, and those who wished to avoid taking a public position against population growth for fear of alienating some of their members.