An Australia where everyone in public speaks and writes in rhyming poetry with the cadences of Henry Lawson. This is the most prized ability in the whole land. School children are prepped for gruelling contests of rhyme and wit, often with improvisations on a wide range of topics. All debates in parliament are rhymed, as is the evening news. The news takes on somewhat anecdotal quality, favoring a good yarn over factual accuracy. A whole country of Lawsonian Homers sings itself into legend by sheer metrical virtuosity.

It was in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, that Judith Wright was given the job of writing ‘Quadrangles’, a social column for the student newspaper, Honi Soit.

In this reading of history, prior to the sexual revolution and the availability of the pill, every woman would have as many children as their body could handle because they had no access to reliable birth control. All women had children, except for those who physically couldn’t.

Today, the history of the cameleers (or ‘Afghans’ as they were known then, though they came from an area that stretched from Afghanistan to what is now the most north-western part of India) is mostly used as a liberal lesson about multiculturalism. That is, the cameleers’ contribution to the federation’s economy becomes the premise for an enlarged, more inclusive nationalism.

But the tracking of lives through government documentation, in particular Aboriginal lives and the lives of other racialised people, has a long history. Despite Keane’s alarm, this kind of surveillance is not a novel breach of privacy. Certain lives and populations have been subject to tracking and surveillance since the beginnings of colonisation in this country; such scrutiny has been a key tactic of various Australian governments.

On Friday 4 August 1939, while members of the Queensland State Labor Caucus were having their morning meeting in a room in Parliament House in Brisbane, a group of 37 men, calling themselves the ‘Social Justice League’, entered, making threats, carrying batons, coils of barbed wire, hammers, knuckledusters and other tools. Barricading themselves in, they demanded a 40-hour week, lower taxes and tolls, unemployment relief, cooperative ownership of primary industry, and a ‘stabilised price’ for farmers.

As the dust settles on another Australian election campaign, in which the population resoundingly supported no party, no program, no leader, British Politics is undergoing a sea change. Thrust into the centre – almost like a feat of the imagination, some flight of fancy recalling A Very British Coup – came Jeremy Corbyn, a social-democrat in the old style. For the first time in decades, there is a national leader in the anglophone world arguing against neoliberalism in Old Left terms.

These days, political commentary is dominated by right-wing ratbags, free-market warriors, or urbane personalities like George Megalogenis. From the chaos and moral sterility of the status quo, these wizards of punditry conjure a narrative they hope will soothe us. Never once do these political gurus question the ideological padlocks that chain us like Sisyphus to the dictates of economic rationalism.

I share Teresa’s surprise to discover she was no longer recognised as a bona fide Australian citizen due to recent changes in the law. I also shared her concern. Did the same apply to me? Like Teresa, I hold an Australian passport, have worked for the government, have voted, and became the parent of children born in Australia. But there is a difference: a single, double-sided, colour sheet of stiff A4 paper. This is my Australian citizenship certificate.

It is not hard to draw parallels to nineteen-thirties Europe in the current European situation. Austerity has proven itself to fail in Greece. And in addressing the issue, Europe’s financiers have instead made bland justifications for more restrictions, which has fed into the xenophobic rhetoric of the far-right.

Of course neoliberalism is deeply problematic – but so is reducing all of the world’s current problems to this one ideology. Neoliberalism hit its heights in the 1980s, but nowadays is nowhere near as prevalent. Focusing all our energy on this one school of thought means we are misdiagnosing the problem, and, in turn, giving power back to the very people who developed the system in the first place.

A few years ago I received a phone call from the current Energy and Resources minister, Josh Frydenberg. He called me in response to an email I had sent only hours earlier on behalf of Jews for Refugees (JFR), drawing his attention to the case of the MV Struma. The Struma was a ship carrying 781 Jewish refugees from Romania that, on 23 February 1942, was towed from the harbour in Istanbul to the Black Sea, leaving the ship adrift. The next day the Struma was torpedoed and sunk by a Russian submarine.

Arguing over whether criticising Israel or Zionism is a form of racism is an almost insane inversion of reality: 58 per cent of Israelis think Israel practices apartheid in some (or many) ways. Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians since 1967 without granting them basic civil or political rights. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have rights under Israeli law denied to Palestinians living in the same territory.

Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum is nearing the end of its time at the National Museum in Canberra. I have no wish to dismiss the significance of this large-scale exhibition, the engagement with communities and the hard work of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators coming at these issues from the inside. But we should also be prepared to look critically at the consequences of acknowledging and listening, as if this were a political end unto itself.

Over a month has passed since Australia Day, and Aboriginal affairs are once again receding into the horizon. The Closing the Gap Report attracted little popular attention, despite demonstrating that progress towards equality between white and black Australia remains stuck in the mud in five out of seven areas, including life expectancy.

Take the spoils and leave the debts. In other words, let’s fly the Confederate flag, but refuse to have a conversation about reparations or affirmative action. Let’s have hundreds of Confederate memorials, and not one museum dedicated to slavery. Let’s all read Gone with the Wind, but ignore the convict lease system that locked African Americans into unpaid labour in the aftermath of slavery.