Arena Magazine articles from December 2004

Arena Magazine archives from December 2004

Correction.(Correction Notice)
December 1, 2004... In issue 73 of Arena Magazine, a number of grammatical and other errors appeared in Boris Frankel's article 'Sado-Workism: The New Culture of Work in Australia.' The second sentence reading 'The late twentieth-century French anarchists...

After progress? the four questions of global politics.(Editorial)(Editorial)
December 1, 2004... First Act Midway through one of Barry Cohen's earlier, funnier books he reminisces on a bizarre, fruitless issue that consumed the Whitlam Government at one time: whether or not to put some money into a failing historical theme park known...

Self-absorption wins the day: a new politics can be salvaged from two decades of creeping affluenza.(Election Roundup)
December 1, 2004... It was not the extraordinary public spending spree of the election campaign that sank Labor, but the sustained private consumption binge that Australians have been on for the past decade. Booming house prices coupled with unprecedented levels...

The election we had to have? Scratching a little below the surface.(Election Roundup)
December 1, 2004... The federal election has provoked more than the usual dose of post-mortems and soul-searching. Explanations for the defeat of the ALP have concentrated on such factors as Latham's youthfulness or 'inexperience'; the ill-judged last minute...

Kicking against the pricks: analysing the Greens 2004 election result.(Election Roundup)
December 1, 2004... The sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli frequently expressed the sentiment, 'If you want to change the world, prepare to feel the full force of the reaction against you from those that have the most to lose'. If the last...

Post-election blues: more than ever, lesbian rights need political support.(Election Roundup)
December 1, 2004... With the re-election of the Howard Government and the entry of Family First into the Senate, things are about to get much tougher for lesbians. That a Family First campaign worker's comments on burning lesbians at the stake can pass with little...

Where Indonesian heads are at: the life of the mind lives on in Jakarta.(Against the Current)
December 1, 2004... I feel sick, disheartened. Reaching Jakarta on 9 September, I learn at the airport that a bomb, detonated in front of the Australian Embassy, has hours earlier killed nine and wounded more than 160 people. In a newspaper photo I'll later...

Where Once Children.(Poetry)(Poem)
December 1, 2004... Where Once Children Where once children ran in the mazes of our streets today, young petrol heads drive their war trucks Suicide bombers give new meaning to the ephemerality, the fragility of the...

The rich man in his castle: politics and poverty in India.(Against the Current)
December 1, 2004... Early in 2004, the Indian Government launched 'India Shining, a media campaign intended to create a feel-good factor based on several years of high economic growth rates that would hopefully ensure its victory in the subsequent general...

Civil society and development: taking a closer look at 'bottom-up development' in South Asia.(Against the Current)
December 1, 2004... Civil society participation has become a standard ingredient in most donor-endorsed governance recipes, given its potential to enhance public responsibility by bridging the gap between a state and its citizens. Officials in the South Asian...

Caveat emptor: European governments should resist the Howard Government's efforts to sell the 'Pacific Solution'.(Against the Current)
December 1, 2004... If your child face this condition what will you act and realise? And how much does it disturb you in your every single step? For many Australians, the Howard Government's Pacific Solution is a source of great shame, embarrassment and...

Scenes from a mall.(Bites: brief notes on news and views from around the world)
December 1, 2004... It's banal to observe that cities grow and change. It's more interesting to register how those changes impact upon the people that use cities--and particularly those outside the 'target market' of new urban spaces. QV is a semi-completed...

Human being and abortion.(Bites: brief notes on news and views from around the world)
December 1, 2004... Only those who didn't have their eye on the main game would have been surprised by the sudden eruption of the abortion debate in the wake of John Howard's grand-slam It's safe to say that had the result given control of the Senate to the...

Pitcairn Island and questions of morality.(Bites: brief notes on news and views from around the world)
December 1, 2004... A number of the recent sexual fence convictions against several ale residents of the Pitcairn Islands resulted from the maintenance of what have been described as 'consensual' sexual relationships between the men and the girls, many of whom...

To melt, thaw and resolve ourselves.
December 1, 2004... The American election delayed release of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, but its principal authors have spoken to the US Congress and its contents have been discussed in North American and world media. As the Washington Post...

Torture, culture and signs of the times: a reply to John Hinkson.(Comment)(Editorial)
December 1, 2004... John Hinkson's recent editorial, 'The Culture of Torture' (Arena Magazine, No. 71), raises what is surely one of the most worrying signs of these admittedly worrying times. This is the question of the legitimacy of torture, brought so horribly...

'Ugly heads' and blanket condemnations: protest and populism in Latin America.(http://trawlings: the best of the web)
December 1, 2004... Over the past week, important public figures from Mexico's President Vicente Fox to Interamerican Development Bank President Enrique Iglesias have joined forces to warn that 'populism' is rearing its ugly head again in Latin America. The...

Notable publications.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Mark McKenna, This Country: A Reconciled Republic? (UNSW Press, 2004) This Country presents a passionate argument for imagining the republic anew. It explains why the two great symbolic issues of Australian politics in the 1990s--the...

The rise and rise of the Pentecostals: in an era of doubt, an imposed set of values and the promise of wealth are proving a successful recipe for the Pentecostal churches.(Essay)
December 1, 2004... At Sydney's Hillsong Church in Baulkham Hills--more purpose-built entertainment centre than cathedral of contemplation--the congregation lines up for a communal baptism, plunging their entire bodies in a huge pool that emerges from beneath the...

Sharing common ground: the Ngarinyin people's desire for equal engagement with European law has some way to travel writes.(Native Title)
December 1, 2004... On 8 December last year, Ross Sundberg, a Federal court judge, with his host of office bearers and seventy-odd Aboriginal witnesses and their families--having travelled together by road, plane and helicopter, for several weeks at a time, across...

The Weaners.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2004... The Weaners This morning they yarded the weaner calves. All day they've been bawling in the bitter cold shuffling together and crying out in the absence of their mothers tracking up and down the wire fence ...

Post-Derrida: the complex legacy of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers.(Cooper's Last)
December 1, 2004... To confirm the cultural significance of the recently deceased philosopher Jacques Derrida, you need go no further than register the number of jokes that have arisen questioning whether he had died at all--jokes which in their own way rely on...

Kate Sands on the art of witness.
December 1, 2004... William Kentridge Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2 September-28 November 2004 There is a sort of wilful amnesia, a refusal to accept accountability, that comes from the naturalisation of outrageous systems in the world. But I'm more...

Karen Halasa on sensitive new-age gangsters.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Mark Nicholls Scorcese's Men. Melancholia and the Mob Pluto Press, 2004 Mark Nicholls' interesting analysis of some of the major works of Martin Scorsese, Scorsese's Men: Melancholia and the Mob, links not just the Scorsese films that...

New Internationalist: October 2004.(Mag Watch)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The October edition of New Internationalist takes anti-Semitism as its central topic, taking apart popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Zionist Government groups and looking at the extensive history of anti-Semitism around the world....

Eureka Street: November 2004.(Mag Watch)
December 1, 2004... Staking similar ground is a feature on 'The New Jews of Berlin' in Eureka Street. This piece reports that Berlin, a city haunted by the Holocaust, and 'self-consciously' attempting reconciliation and remembrance, is home to a growing Jewish...

Theory, Culture & Society: October 2004.(Mag Watch)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Drawing largely from writers on geography, this edition of TC&S is given over to discussions on transport. Tim Edensor writes on the connections between cars and national identity, arguing that such everyday artefacts reveal much about a...

Australian Book Review: November 2004.(Mag Watch)
December 1, 2004... In this edition of ABR, writers explore their own sphere and that of their cohort: headed 'The Writing Life', it offers articles by Inga Clendinnen, Sophie Cunningham and Peter Porter on the craft of authorship. Among the many reviews included,...

Monthly Review: November 2004.(Mag Watch)
December 1, 2004... Twelve years after the Rio Earth Summit, John Bellamy Foster and Dennis Soron wonder out loud why any hope of environmental reform seems to have been squandered. Political debates around climate change, for example, seem stalled even though...

Bill Clinton's America.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Bill Clinton My Life Hutchinson, 2004 Bill Clinton's autobiography, My Life, helps explain an extraordinary individual and career, so often underestimated, and someone whose ideals have often fallen short in practice despite his best...

Terry Eagleton's Theory.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Terry Eagleton, After Theory Allan Lane, 2003 Postmodern cultural theorists are much in the habit of declaring the end or, more ominously, the death of things--man, the author, even theory itself. Now one of their most trenchant critics is...

The white stuff: asbestos: Australia's fickle friend.
December 1, 2004... I spent 1981 working for an air-conditioning firm that routinely used white asbestos sheeting on its production line. The stuff was fixed inside beating ducts by a designated employee, who habitually tossed off-cuts onto the factory floor. Most...

After the bawling is over.
December 1, 2004... It's more than a month since the federal election. Soon it will be two months, then a year and, all too quickly, another election will be on the horizon. As Lenin once asked, 'What is to be done?' The most surprising thing about the 2004...

Good folk trooping all together.
December 1, 2004... I was making my way up the steps of the Victorian Parliament House on my way to the launch of Ross McMullin's book on Chris Watson, the first Labor Prime Minister. I was angling from the left across the expanse of steps, when around the corner...

To my friends on the occasion of an election defeat ...
December 1, 2004... When CNN's coverage was flapping aimlessly mid-evening, James Carville was clear: 'Can we just talk about Ohio. It's all that matters, Ohio, Ohio, Ohio!' Three hours later they finally realised he was right. Focus and judgement. So it was...

It's the economy ... and the culture.
December 1, 2004... Modern labour parties around the globe now routinely act as though questions of economic management are beyond politics. Questions of how the economy is organised and run are regarded as having been settled in favour of the self-regulating...

Faultlines and failures.
December 1, 2004... Having changed leaders and embracing the clarion call for 'generational change' not only of its own parliamentary party but also of the government, the Australian Labor Party's defeat at the hands of John Howard's Coalition in the 2004 federal...

The new centre.
December 1, 2004... The principal lesson from four federal election losses is clear: Labor has failed to establish its economic management credentials to voters in the provincial centres and outer suburbs of metropolitan Australia. In an economy driven by...

Notes on the way ahead.
December 1, 2004... I The Australian and US election losses do not mark a repudiation of the Democrats or the ALP, they mark a rejection of bad campaigns and poor leadership. I do not doubt that a figure of the stature, charisma and command of a pre-Monica...