Editorial
Overland goes to press with the federal election some weeks away. Yet, while the parliamentary winner remains uncertain, it’s already perfectly apparent who will lose. The poll marks a renewed demonisation of asylum seekers, with the major parties competing to heap cruelties upon the heads of those with the temerity to seek refuge in Australia. The entirety of the political establishment remains committed to a neoliberalism that produces a noxious mixture of consumerism and repression – as George Steiner put it: ‘The knout on the one hand; the cheeseburger on the other.’
