If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. – Emma Goldman NSW voters can be forgiven for taking an axe to the ALP government that held state power for sixteen years. Last Saturday’s election gave voters the opportunity they had been waiting for and the ALP was dumped with enough conviction to keep them out […]

In early January, on a random scrap of paper on my desk, I wrote: ‘I just want it said, if there is any need to say it, that it seems blindingly obvious to me that Kevin Rudd is already wondering if he can do to Julia Gillard what she did to him; shaft her and […]

The erosion of the ALP’s long grip on the working-class vote in NSW has been spectacular, reflecting the long-term processes that Left Flank has repeatedly drawn attention to. Yet it can still rely on a significant party organisation, and even more so the active endorsement (or at least passive acceptance) of trade union leaders, organisers […]

It is now received wisdom that the NSW branch of the ALP is responsible for everything that is wrong with Labor politics in Australia. Even smug Victorian state ministers have felt comfortable parroting this line publicly. In particular, the argument goes, the NSW Right are a bunch of unaccountable thugs who singlehandedly destroyed what should […]

The proof is in the painting. It has been ‘revealed’ that this year’s winner of the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting is a fraud, a fake, a phoney, a copycat, and worst of all, unoriginal. Yep, it’s true. Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos by Sam Leach is almost an exact replica of a work […]