The idea that youth voters are more progressive but under-represented is not a new one, not specific to the English-speaking world and clearly not to Australia. What’s new, and what I want to argue for, is the idea that we should be actively combating this well-known state of affairs. The youth vote is powerful and should be treated as such, but youth themselves can’t help but feel powerless.

My first thought on reading After the Riots, the newly published UK government report on the riots of 2011, was that it was written by The Onion. It could certainly use as a subheading the title of one of John Cage’s brief essays, ‘How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)’.

In a world in which we’ve been desensitised to the shock of war and conflict, in which those two very things are normalised, you sometimes need to slow things down, step outside and put things into perspective. This year at TiNA, I saw an event that did just that. It was the publication of Westside […]

Last week the London chapter of the international writing-school revolution began with the opening of the Ministry of Stories. A few months ago, I went to Dublin and paid a visit to the Irish centre, Fighting Words. Set up by author Roddy Doyle and former director of Amnesty International Ireland, Sean Love, the centre had […]

Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, education was the means to which anyone could transform their lives. In the near future if you want your child to attend university they will need to attend a private school or one of the few selective high schools in the country. If your child […]

I came across this online Age newspaper article by Kylie Northover, ‘Graffiti is enough to give a critic an art attack’ (8 May 2010), a response to ‘Hey Banksy, graffiti is vandalism not art’ by Charles Purcell (4 May 2010). I was duly horrified. Purcell concludes his smug, ignorant rant with the following outrageous suggestion: […]