If your vote felt like it didn’t matter, it might be because it didn’t. There weren’t even two evils to choose from. I’m not saying, of course, that our avoidance of a variety of social, economic and environmental disasters wasn’t at stake. But with equal certainty, the fitness of our current political and economic model to deal with these problems was never really up for discussion – let alone the possibility that this way of doing things has in many cases created, aggravated or prolonged those very problems.

When I first entered the dark satanic mills of parenthood, I spent a good deal of time stomping around shouting, ‘This job should be unionised!’ The hours are terrible, the demands unreasonable, there are numerous occupational health and safety breaches, you are always ‘on call’ and its really hard to understand what your boss wants. The pay is horrific too.

The real problem for the Left is that we are seeing the eclipse of a century-long era institutionalisation of politics around a rigid Right/Left axis. Further, Rudd’s project of directly attacking the remnants of labourism (that is, the organised intervention of the trade union bureaucracy in official politics) has created a situation where the traditional reference points are no longer there to orient more radical political projects.

Retail politics used to mean the baby-kissing and town-hall mode of campaign time, which we can still see: witness Abbott’s awkward military boot camp squats in Darwin, or Rudd’s awkward selfies with Muslim voters in Western Sydney. But this performance feels tired and incidental to the game somehow. In politics circa 2013, retail politics also describes what happens behind the scenes as the parties subject themselves to hard analysis, not of policy but of market dynamics.

For a leftist, what hope can there be for an election? Either the ALP will win, or the Coalition will. On leftist issues, the results will be disastrous. On foreign policy, the differences are negligible. Both parties favour strong alliances with Anglo-US imperialism, their wars, puppet states and bombings. On asylum seekers, there’s been a race to find somewhere below the gutter by both major parties.

On the centre-Left, a new election meme has been incubating, one that attributes Gillard’s persistent unpopularity to the hostility of the media, which has been either too shallow (the Monthly) or too sexist (Anne Summers) to appreciate her achievements.

It seems, then, that we have a government. What to make of the result? Andrew Robb recently wailed that a Labor-Green coalition would install ‘the most left wing government in Australia’s history’. Now, of course, that’s not, like, actually true or anything, but the rhetoric does highlight how remarkable this outcome actually is. Remember, a […]

Not exactly great news to wake up to but it’s not as bad as it might be. Sure, it’s more likely than not that Tony Abbott will be the new prime minister, and the prospect of a conservative government propped up by sinister bumpkins like Bob Katter is pretty grim. Certainly, when Abbott became leader, […]

In last night’s puppet show, the topic of Afghanistan emerged only briefly but sufficiently long for both candidates to pledge ongoing war until the ‘job is done’. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now have a much greater idea of what exactly that job is. The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing […]

With an election called it soon won’t be long before the list of election promises start filling screens and printed pages around the country. Promises from the last election will be brought up and assessed as to whether they’ve been broken, kept or whether they’re in progress. The adjective ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ may be resurrected. […]

And so to an election on 21 August. It’s not an inspiring prospect: a contest between two candidates, each of whom could plausibly be described as the most conservative leader their respective parties have ever fielded. About Tony Abbott, nothing need really be said. He is precisely what he seems, an amalgam of John Howard […]

The media’s focus on personality over policy – and in that shrinking proportion of the time in which policy is discussed, the endless speculation on how events will be perceived, and how ‘narratives’ will ‘play out’, rather than the actual impact of policies on people – makes for a lack of serious analysis that results […]

Because you support independent media and are thus a subscriber to Overland, you’ve no doubt already read Tad Tietze’s provocative article from the latest edition on the past, present and future of the Australian Greens. In case you haven’t, the essay is now online. Tad’s thesis has already occasioned much debate over at Larvatus Prodeo. […]

This week the Sydney Morning Herald ran a feature on marketing strategies and then two days later there was a story on Tony Abbott’s Ironman endeavours. How are these related and what does it have to do with Degrassi? Read on, intrepid Overlanders. It’s a widely recognised fact that each generation is more media and […]