The Milky Bar kid

Kevin Rudd was seen as a breath of fresh air after replacing the long serving John Howard as Australia’s Prime Minister in 2007 but leadership battles with Julia Gillard and a failure to embrace radical reform doomed his premiership to failure.

This is my truth, now tell me yours

British Labour icon Nye Bevan popularised Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “This is my truth, now tell me yours” 80 years ago, but the challenge remains as aposite as ever.

Who watches the watchmen?

In the concluding part of his essay on contemporary Australian politics, Bernard Paul Corden calls for the Labor Party to grasp the nettle of radical reform, rather than merely manage the current economic and social settlement slightly better than the Liberals.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Roman poet Juvenal asked “Who will watch the watchmen?” two thousand years ago and the question remains as apposite as ever, as a population suffused with “bread and circuses” scarcely bats an eye at their rulers’ excesses.

Mister Ed

The recent election of Angus Taylor as the new leader of the Liberal Party has prompted much discussion about the new direction it may take but should also draw attention to dubious business linked with both parties.

Crisis? What crisis? A question of balance

Bernard Corden concludes his hard hitting three part series on the failures of neo-liberalism with a plea for a better future for us all.

Crisis? What crisis? Another brick in the wall

The rapid expansion of science and technology in the new millennium has radically transformed our social landscape with a foreboding trajectory and corrosive impact on democracy.

Crisis? What crisis? Aristocratic terrorism

In a new 3-part series, Bernard Cordon argues the Chicago school of monetarist economics in the 1970s and the neo-liberal political movement which followed in the 1980s set the scene for Donald Trump’s thuggish dismantling of the USA today.

Arbeit macht frei

The appalling conditions suffered by some migrant workers in the United States is mirrored by long standing abuses of workers rights in this country as well.

The goose and the common

Mark Carney’s powerful oration at the recent Davos World Economic Forum won him plaudits for a rare act of defiance against the madness of Donald Trump, but Canada has its own fair share of capitalist excesses.

Rattling a stick inside a swill bucket

Distracting adverts along the roads may increase the number of deaths and injuries, but it’s merely a symptom of the much larger problem of rapacious capitalism’s corroding effect on the whole of modern society.