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Most restaurants don’t grow all their own food. Of course, they can and may grow some produce, but their expertise is on the preparation, cooking and plating of the dish. They look to farmers to supply the raw ingredients. This is a pretty good analogy for the role of the national newswire, Australian Associated Press (AAP), which will be closing mid 2020.
The stockpiling has left many facing empty aisles and lacking basic necessities. But this doomsday practice extends beyond not being able to buy pasta shells or running out of toilet paper — it also leaves vulnerable populations at risk.
Pride is politically messy. When you stir together an alphabet soup of people, all of which have other intersecting identities (race, class, religion, political allegiance), you will invariably plate up a political mess. And the 2020 Sydney Mardi Gras dished quite the menu.
The Morrison government despises the working class. There is no other explanation for its behaviour. For all the ‘lifters and leaners’ or ‘workers and shirkers’ guff that we’ve seen over the years from this and past governments, the truth is that, according to the neoliberal worldview, whether you’re in paid work or on social security, you’re despised unless you belong to its own big money elite.
Contrary to their claims, the New Atheists do have a creation myth. It goes something like this: emerging from darkness into the light, Enlightenment thinkers cast off the shackles of religion and, in so doing, ushered in an age of reason. For the likes of Richard Dawkins, a founding member of the movement, this is an article of faith, and he’s spent recent years casting himself not just as an heir of this tradition, but also as its modern day guardian.
One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.
The common-sense enthusiasm for depoliticising environmentalism — voiced most recently in relation to the bill proposed by the conservative independent Zali Steggall — pushes in entirely the wrong direction.
Despite claims to the contrary, the decision in Love and Thoms affirms the standing of the common law, including the unassailable power of the Australian State to make and enforce law. It upholds the centuries-long common law principle of accommodation of Indigenous laws in a colonial context.
At its heart, the question was whether an Indigenous Australian who was eligible for citizenship but had never formalised it could be regarded as an alien and therefore subject to removal. In a landmark judgment, a 4:3 majority of the Court found that Indigenous Australians were not aliens, even if they were not citizens.
In the Apology to the Stolen Generations the Australian Government spoke on behalf of all Australians in recognising that it acted wrongly in removing Indigenous children from their parents. It recognised also that the reason for the removal was the disrespectful claim that its targets were defined, not by their shared humanity, but by their race. This disrespect caused lasting damage to the children and families.
With blazes nearby, TV news bars well on fire, we human animals are panicked, feel the shudder of rotors above our roofs. Very soon thirsty helitankers will thunder down to drink from our neighbourhood lake. May we remember tomorrow, nothing will be more worried than pelicans in broken reeds, the night heron in its naked tree.
This is cosmically far from saying that these are equivalent matters to the death camps of the Holocaust. But if we are to be serious about acknowledging the depravity of Auschwitz, we can at least take the lead from Katz on starting the conversation on why such events take place and do remain chillingly relevant.