Arena Magazine articles from April 1998

Arena Magazine archives from April 1998

Santamaria: a man without quality? (B.A. Santamaria)(Editorial)
April 1, 1998... Just a few days after the death of B. A. Santamaria another Santamaria wrote to the Age (4.3.98) seeking a moratorium. Speaking on behalf of thirty-three grandchildren he wanted the writers of articles `giving Grandad a bad name... to bite their...

A conventional convention. (Australia's 1998 Constitutional Convention)
April 1, 1998... The Constitutional Convention closed in Canberra on Friday, 13 February, with a sense of victory, even euphoria among the great majority of the delegates. But was their elation justified? Was the Convention the success the closing moment...

A virtual killing. (crimes against indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico)
April 1, 1998... A man within the small community of San Isidro al Ocatel, four hours' walk from the main road to San Cristobal de Las Casas, would respond every morning to my polite, `Como esta Usted?', with `Ahorita, todo es tranquilo' (At the moment, all is...

The people versus APEC. (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum)
April 1, 1998... On 19 November 1997 senior trade officials from eighteen Pacific rim countries, meeting in Vancouver for the APEC Summit, dined in splendour at one of Vancouver's most exclusive restaurants. Across town the Peoples' Summit on APEC was opened by a...

A new cool Age. (Australian periodical)
April 1, 1998... In the last week a cool new Age has hit the streets of Melbourne. With its cool blue masthead, its liberal white, and its big stylised images, it's not just a redesign but a self-conscious aesthetication of the newspaper. The Age still aims to...

The double-crossing magic of Tony Blair.
April 1, 1998... For the seasoned Australian political junkie, the trials and tribulations of the Blair Government can be conducive to a powerful sense of deja vu encore et encore une lois. That Blair and the other New Labour apparatchiks took the Hawke/Keating...

The identity of the author? (Aboriginal places portrayed by white writers)
April 1, 1998... I picked up a book by Stephen Muecke, No Road. Bitumen All the Way, and I had an `Aha!' reaction. He writes about a remarkable woman I once met, and a wild place I visited one moonlight evening. Stephen Muecke wrote his story one way. I wrote...

Cottage Catholicism: young Santamaria and the lure of the pastoral. (B.A. Santamaria)
April 1, 1998... If the sight of collared clergy calmly eating salad sandwiches in the city immediately after the funeral of Bob Santamaria reminded me somehow of the verities of an old Catholicism, the assembly of Liberal politicians jockeying for prominence...

Reading Santamaria backwards: putting politics first. (B.A. Santamaria)
April 1, 1998... A couple of weeks before Bartholomew Santamaria died, I wrote a letter to the editors of this magazine about him. I was taking issue with a number of points raised by Geoff Sharp, in his review in Arena Magazine No. 30, of the revised edition of...

Australia and East Timor.
April 1, 1998... White Australia is a relatively young society and we are only now, at the end of the twentieth century, beginning to discover who, where and what we are in relation to our actual social and physical milieu. As the term `downunder' suggests, for...

Community development.
April 1, 1998... Three test umpires were having a beer after a test series had ended. The first one, born before the Second World War, said: `There are run-outs and stumpings and I call them as they are'. The second umpire, born in 1955, raised an eyebrow and...

Money.
April 1, 1998... Since the early 1980s the world of money has been launched into a new orbit. Thanks to the practical intellectual feats of the sciences, money is now everywhere. Even aspects of human relationships such as reproduction, which have always stood...

Skimming a few billion off the top: can the speculators be taxed?
April 1, 1998... Every moment of the day or night, the jackals in the financial jungle are ordering their computers to buy Australian dollars or German marks, to sell Thai baht or Mexican pesos. Their day's turnover can well exceed in volume the entire foreign...

Carte blanche for global corporations. (Multilateral Agreement on Investment)
April 1, 1998... The objective of the OECD's proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) is clearly to consolidate the power of transnational corporations. Its motto might well be `Investors of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your profits'....

A great unified world.
April 1, 1998... Globalisation has transformed the world in ways truly unimaginable only twenty years ago. These changes are forcing us to reassess the foundations of democratic society, the welfare of the disadvantaged and the way we see the rest of the world....

A taxing problem. (Australia's proposed Goods and Services Tax)
April 1, 1998... The first reaction to the possibility of tax debate has to be a humanitarian one: if John Howard has such a dull life that only `the great adventure of tax reform' is able to generate any excitement for him, then he deserves our sympathy. Further...

A nation of shareholders.
April 1, 1998... Congratulations, you are now a capitalist. This may come as news to you, but sections of the New Right appear to have little doubt. Yes, the `people's capitalism' thesis is being flogged around town again following the partial privatisation...

Welfare After the Welfare State: Reimaging Social Christianity.
April 1, 1998... Trevor Hogan, Welfare After the Welfare State, Reimaging Social Christianity, Occasional Paper, Brotherhood of St Laurence, 1997. As Trevor Hogan puts it in this the sixteenth Sambell Memorial Oration, the welfare state no longer `meets the...

Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Post-Colonial World.
April 1, 1998... Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Post-colonial World, Cambridge University Press 1998. Chilla Bulbeck's latest publication is an important new text for Australian Women's Studies and feminist politics. The...

Defying Gravity: A Political Life.
April 1, 1998... Dennis Altman, Defying Gravity: A Political Life, Allen & Unwin, 1997. Towards the end of his unconventional autobiography, Dennis Altman notes that `Writers need editors and a good editor is like a good therapist, someone who can read the...

From One Day to Another: Violations of Women's Reproductive and Sexual Rights in East Timor.
April 1, 1998... From One Day to Another: Violations of Women's Reproductive and Sexual Rights in East Timor, Miranda A. Sissons, East Timor Human Rights Centre, Fitzroy 1997. In 1995, at the Non-Governmental Organizations' Forum associated with the Beijing...

Postcard from New York.
April 1, 1998... Arriving in New York City is like suddenly waking up (naked) in the Amazon Jungle during an outdoor Science Fiction Convention, at which Gillian Anderson from The X-Files is keynote speaker. And from there, it never stops being weirdly intense....