The blunt reality is this: we have a generation, or more precisely, several generations, who can only imagine life getting more difficult. Job security is lower, competition for employment is greater, education is getting ever more expensive.

Tony Abbott will turn 56 in November, around the time parliament returns to sit. By the time he is voted out in late 2022 (unless he is removed by nervous Coalition backbenchers earlier that year), he will be almost 65 – a few years shy of retirement age, but close enough. Abbott will be Australia’s last boomer Prime Minister.

David Shearer, the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party didn’t lose his job after an electoral defeat, but a mere twenty months into his term as Leader of the Opposition.

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.

The current focus on border protection as a matter of security is a fairly recent development. As Tad Tietze discusses, even during the twentieth century there were periods in which large numbers of people were able to freely migrate to Europe, the US and Australia. The US ignored the flow of Mexicans crossing the border after the Second World War.

I travelled to Turkey in late June to attend Global Power Shift, hosted by 350.org. It was about a month after the start of a nation-wide protest movement sparked by the proposed demolition of Gezi Park in Istanbul and I was intrigued to see what was going on. I went in with no idea about Turkish politics and little understanding of the movement. But through talking to activists and seeing it in action, I learnt a lot.

For the sake of elementary critical reflection, it might be worth reminding our nation’s policy chiefs of the manifest oddities of free market capitalism.

On the weekend, the Age’s editorial calling for Julia Gillard to stand down for Kevin Rudd spurred outrage all over social media. Certainly, the leader writer’s suggestion that a Gillard resignation would foster ‘vigorous, policy-driven democratic debate’ stuck in the throat. ‘The Age is […] despairing of the vacuum in policy debate,’ explained the piece, as if the editor of a major newspaper played no role whatsoever determining what was debated and how.

The DSM-5’s publication has generated something of a backlash, as professionals and non-professionals – using an internet that wasn’t available when DSM-4 appeared – articulate what everyone has known for yonks: that the DSM is unreliable, unsafe and promotes models of mental health that look positively Orwellian.

Something is rotten at the heart of Sydney University. On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. […]