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Keywords: The Sparrow

  • INTERNATIONAL

    The west's fossil fuels problem is strategic, too

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 08 July 2019
    5 Comments

    When discussing climate change, it's easy to depict the world's reliance on fossil fuels as primarily a technological problem, to be resolved by new methods for harnessing renewable energies. But that's only part of the story, as the example of Saudi Arabia shows.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    'Climate emergency' endangers democracy

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 21 June 2019
    7 Comments

    Historically, a declaration of emergency, whether in response to war, civil unrest or natural disaster, allows the state to suppress debate to enable a militarised response to an urgent problem. You can see why that might appeal as a solution to the environmental crisis. But addressing climate change requires more democracy, not less.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What went wrong for Labor on climate

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 20 May 2019
    19 Comments

    Had Labor flatly opposed Adani, it would have been better positioned to sell a different model for the creation of local jobs and security. Instead, the lack of clarity prevented the ALP from articulating a persuasive economic alternative to a mine it wouldn't say definitely was closing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Republic of Religion

    • B. A. Breen
    • 13 May 2019
    4 Comments

    I moved to the Land of Magic, found it full of mumbo-jumbo. I bounced to the Kingdom of Rhythm, too many ups and downs. I went eagerly to Warm-and-Fuzzy, soon bogged down in treacle. I trekked to the Republic of Religion, it was open only on Sundays.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Echoes of Auschwitz in Manus memoir

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 March 2019
    6 Comments

    Like Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his works, Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains exemplifies among many other things 'the possibilities of human decency' despite the Manus prison's squalor. Like George Orwell in another time and place, he is buoyed by hope in irrepressible nature.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hubris and hate speech in Mark Latham's Nation

    • Moira Rayner
    • 26 March 2019
    11 Comments

    How is it that with so few people 'on the ground', with sharp divisions among its spokespeople, and with the flight of PHON candidates, once elected, to continue to hold their seats as 'independents', the party may sneak into a position where, as Ashby and Dickson mused, they 'hold the balls of the government' in their sweaty little hands?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The wake

    • Wally Swist
    • 25 March 2019
    4 Comments

    A child approaches the casket, reaches within to try to lift my folded hands, to make sure, as she tells her mother later, that I am not just sleeping.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Reckoning is due after Afghanistan endgame

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 31 January 2019
    18 Comments

    John Howard promised to 'stay the course' in Afghanistan. So too did Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. So complete was the political consensus that parliament didn't even debate the Afghan intervention until nine years after it began. Now that there's no longer a course on which to stay, we're due some accountability.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The myth of polarisation in modern Australia

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 10 December 2018
    12 Comments

    Why do so many pundits decry the divisions in Canberra at a time when, objectively speaking, the parties have never been closer? The short answer is that they're responding to a genuine polarisation — not between Labor and Liberal but between both parties and the rest of society.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Enterprises begun, projects explored

    • Denham Grierson
    • 13 November 2018
    4 Comments

    It feels odd to be recycled, my atoms billions of years old, stretching back millennia. What adventures they have had, enterprises begun, projects explored, voyages completed. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Latham and Hanson's marriage of convenience

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 08 November 2018
    3 Comments

    If we say the man's lost his mind, we must, in fairness, acknowledge that he possessed a mind to lose. Bizarre as the notion now sounds, Latham brought consider intellectual firepower to the Labor leadership. His deep commitment to free market policies meant his hostility to Hanson always came as much from the right as the left.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    It's always Happy Death Day in Canberra now

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 30 October 2017
    6 Comments

    Turnbull's response to the eligibility crisis showcased the mixture of bluster and incompetence that's become characteristic of this government. Like Michaela Cash's attempts to link Shorten with union corruption, his declaration that the court would rule in favour of Joyce saw strategy and common sense give way to short term manoeuvring.

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