Progressive culture since 1954
While common-sense ideas of ‘Team Australia’ reached absurd proportions during the pandemic, the underlying logics aren’t new. They reinvigorate much older common sense discourses of settler colonial nationalism: triumph over adversity, unity in crisis, national identity forged in war time. And like most common sense ideas, they function to paper over the foundational contradictions that produce and sustain contemporary crises.
Three weeks ago, students at the University of Melbourne passed a motion in solidarity with Palestine and with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Since then, the student union (UMSU) and the students involved with drafting and passing the motion have come under sustained pressure from Zionist individuals and organisations, including a class action lawsuit threatening to take the union to court if it does not retract the motion.
A is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; B is for Bargaining in Bad Faith; C is for Casualisation; D is for Dialectics; E is for Enterprise Agreement; F is for Funding—or lack thereof; G is for Gaslighting; H is for Human Resources; I is for Inflation; J is for Jim-jams; K is for Kafka …
You can read the election result as signifying a distinct opening, creating opportunities for a very different political conversation. Certainly, we should not think that anything has been settled. It’s satisfying to repeat the words ‘ex-PM Scott Morrison’. Yet the Albanese government will be intensely unstable, particularly since the ALP small target campaign leaves it without any obvious mandate as it stares down the barrel of a global recession.
‘We’re not going to tell you who the client is, because we don’t want your creativity, or your capacity for constructing a narrative, to be limited by a product or a brand. Because what we’ll be creating together this semester…