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Serendipity is defined as the gift of finding valuable things in unexpected places by sheer luck. It is a good description of Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie in Australian politics. But there is a sting in the tail. A system which depends on serendipity potentially also has a big downside.
Now that the UK is in the final phase of leaving the Union we should ask, before the bell tolls, how much this misadventure — or folie de grandeur — was due to politicians putting their interests above those of the nation, ignoring democratic theory and long-settled constitutional practice.
The conservative base wants religious protection for Christians, but has a long history of vilifying Muslims, who, presumably, could also claim protection from any new law. One struggles to imagine a law that might enable a footballer's right to send homophobic tweets, while enabling courts, parliaments and schools to ban burqas.
Indonesian democracy has proven resilient to challenge and made inroads into combatting problems that have beset the country for decades. But a crossroads approaches. A failure to manage religious radicalism and intolerance, corruption, and other social tensions may imperil or destabilise this democratic epoch.
We are expected to believe that all those perceived Labor failures, plus the massive anti-Labor Clive Palmer campaign and the attraction of some positive Coalition policies, only shifted a little over one Australian in every hundred, though more in some states like Queensland and some individual seats. That analysis can't be right.
The recent federal election showed us that refugees and people seeking asylum do not need to be instrumentalised for votes. Perhaps refugee policymaking could be separated from politics. Perhaps it could be evidence-based and humane. Alas, the prevailing frames and politics of border protection quickly came to the fore post-election.
There's a lot to say about the election, and much nonsense doing the rounds. Here's a summary of what went wrong and some ideas for communicating climate change over the next three years. The first thing to note is that the election probably wasn't won or lost on climate.
It is time to return to the more important question of what matters for the future good of Australia. This is what governments and political parties are bound by tradition and by their own official rhetoric to serve. This, not electoral success or failure, should govern their actions and our response as citizens to their governance.
The next month will be full of sugar-hits and sweeteners, whether they be personal tax cuts, grants or special deals for organised interests. Every candidate and party is guilty of this in their scramble to win. Citizens are complicit too if their main concern is 'what's in it for me'. Churches play the game as much as any pressure group.
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.
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?
Any suggestion that Israel is a racist and racial state is often met with outrage and accusations of antisemitism. Yet even supporters of Israel were shocked by the recent legislation of the Nation-State law. The law isn't news, however. Just like the apartheid law in South Africa, it doesn't signify the onset of apartheid; it enshrines it.
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