There’s a bigger and more fundamental question that is usually elided when debates like this pop up. Maybe it’s easier for me, as someone whose current stake in Australian literature is largely limited to that of a reader’s (and, I suspect, as one of the few civilians who has read two of the three shortlisted Miles Franklin novels mentioned by McAvan in her opening paragraph), to put this question into words: ‘Why does no one care about Australian books?’

Reading books as tools or cures risks devaluing literary pleasure, taking enchantment and diminishing it with a utilitarian vocabulary. Certainly literature can bolster our emotional and intellectual equipment, but too much advice about how best to read describes literature as if it had a reducible, quantifiable outcome, as if a book were consumed by its reader and alchemically transmuted into intellect or aptitude.

Indeed, the ‘janitorial ring’ of ‘traditional custodians of the land’ of which Flournoy complains in her article is part of the symbolic problem she later raises: the practice has become routine, rehearsed. I would say the practice has become strategically corrupted: pithy Acknowledgements, heartfelt and perfunctory alike, are equally capable of trying to dislodge Indigenous belonging when they suggest Indigenous relationship to land is ‘traditional’, managerial and ‘custodial’, or position our claim to sovereignty as ‘past-based’, ‘non-possessive’ and merely reparative.

The particular role of the cartoonist in the 21st century remains difficult to gauge. Whenever (and wherever) the official apparatus of censorship is removed, the debate around civility perhaps becomes even more central. This said, in a globally-connected world, cartoonists are still very much looking for their function.

But can the UBI give all that is promised? I no longer think so. Indeed, the model currently proposed has the potential to strengthen racist policies, increase exploitation of migrants, escalate the environmental impacts of our current economic system, and further wealth disparity both locally and globally.

There’s a chilling scene near the beginning of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, Farenheit 451, where Guy Montag discovers that his wife has overdosed on sleeping pills. When the nonplussed emergency technicians arrive they pump Mildred’s stomach using enormous machines, give her a blood transfusion and then leave matter-of-factly: all in a day’s work in the twenty-fourth century.

The Conservatives have not ruled as the Nasty Party, but as the compassionate helping hands whose dedication to austerity is to fulfil its redemptive promise of a utopian society in which everybody pays back their debts. Where Thatcher used austerity policies to divide and rule, today’s Tories instead utilise them to actualise ordinary Britons’ full capitalist potential and even their inner happiness.

A modern-day sugar tax is not about punishing a particular group and has a far more utilitarian basis. The concept of it is based on its function as a disincentive to change a set of unhealthy behaviours. Paternalism is often widely applauded – like compulsory minimum education, vaccination, drivers wearing seatbelts. Such laws are not immune to critique, nor should they be, but that’s ultimately how societies like ours can move along in roughly the right direction.

For the first time in the modern history of the United States, a nationally televised presidential debate revolved around the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. More remarkably still, one of the candidates vigorously defended the latter side. The Saturday Night Live take on this year’s first Democratic primary, therefore, was keenly anticipated. Few, however, expected the coup de grâce that ensued: Larry David, briefly a writer for the show in the mid-1980s who would later go on to phenomenal success with the shows Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, strode up to the podium and delivered a pitch-perfect rendition of the Vermont senator.

The whole Best American Poetry controversy calls to attention some of the long-existing assumptions about certain ethnicities and cultures. Alexie’s statement clearly explains his intention: to ‘encourage debate and celebrate imagination’, and scrutinise the 2015 anthology’s aesthetic range, cultural and racial representation, gender equality and nepotism. It is a goal well achieved: among the 75 poets collected in Best American Poetry 2015, approximately 60 per cent are female and 40 per cent are people of colour; 15 per cent of the poems chosen were first published on the Internet.

During a visit to Wellington by John Howard in 2003, two antiwar protesters – teacher Paul Hopkinson and Overland’s own Dougal McNeill – burned a New Zealand and an Australian flag in protest. The case ended up in court as it was a crime at the time to destroy or damage the New Zealand flag ‘with the intention of dishonouring it’, and Hopkinson was sentenced to pay a fine of more than $700. The conviction was overturned a year later in the High Court, leading subsequent flag-burners to being charged with disorderly conduct instead of the more contentious crime of desecration.

Our lack of debate on drugs is both concerning and a great mystery. After working in the harm-reduction field for over a decade, it seems counterproductive to pigeonhole or view this group through a two-dimensional lens. So often, when drugs are discussed in the public sphere, people who use them are divided off from those who don’t. Following on from this, they are seen as either having ‘given up’ and ‘gotten clean’, or kidding themselves about how much control they have.

In a recent edition of his podcast Waking Up, Sam Harris differentiated religions and cults in this way: ‘Every religion is a kind of cult – it just has more subscribers.’ A million members will get you a religion, a hundred (or, in the case of Heaven’s Gate, just forty) a cult, with all the stigmatic baggage that label brings.

The world can be a very difficult place for women, and there is still abundant sexism experienced by women on a daily basis. But I think it's time that we accept that men should also be part of the solution, and that maybe, if there are times where men are the best candidates, they could represent women in an effective way.

The willingness of young Australians to risk death and injury to kill abroad has long puzzled the left. In the First World War, Australia produced an exceptionally high number of volunteers for the cause of the British Empire. Young Australian men, largely from the manual working-class, rallied to the defence of an imagined Britain whose boundaries stretched from Scotland to Tasmania.

Michael Brown was killed on 9 August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. He was eighteen. He had just graduated high school. He was black. He was shot at least six times by a white police officer. On Friday 13 March 2015, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith gave a reading at Brown University.