Arena Magazine articles from February 1998

Arena Magazine archives from February 1998

Citizen Murdoch and the Pope's indulgence: who owns the Waldorf? (Rupert Murdoch)(Editorial)
February 1, 1998... Rupert Murdoch has just been awarded a papal knighthood. The man perhaps best known for his association with gutter tabloid journalism and sports cable-television is honoured in the category of nonCatholics of `unblemished character' who promote...

Australia and the crisis in Asia.
February 1, 1998... Whether the economic crisis in Asia is containable remains to be seen. Given its novelty, this cannot be predicted. Yet it certainly gives important insights into the kind of global crises of capital which will typify the present era of...

A day in the country with Dr. Death: touring a Croatian war zone, July 1997.
February 1, 1998... We begin our day in the country with Dr Death at Korita. Korita used to be a village of a hundred people, some 150 kilometres east of Zagreb. Now it is a collection of ruined houses. At the time of our visit, the gardens are quite wild in the hot...

An immoral victory: greenhouse greed is simply putting off the inevitable.
February 1, 1998... The Australian increase is wrong and immoral. It's a disgrace and will have to change. Peter Jorgensen, European Union Commissioner During 1997, political leaders from many nations criticised the Australian Government's stand against the...

Rural bludge or rural disadvantage? (Australia's market policy)
February 1, 1998... Twenty-five years ago Ken Buckley wrote an article entitled `The Great Rural Bludge'. Buckley observed at the time that Australian primary producers were `bludging' off the tax system--maintaining large incomes through such things as subsidies...

'Expert' tease: the silencing of HIV. (Australia's AIDS policy)
February 1, 1998... As the AIDS pandemic moves towards its third decade, the question of the degree to which it should be explicitly associated (in public health and education campaigns) with gay lifestyles and the realpolitik of queer life has once again become a...

Virtual nappies. (rising prevalence of automation)
February 1, 1998... Sometime before sunrise I shamble down the hall behind my daughter, anxious not to wake the rest of the house by tripping the movement detector standing sentinel over the stairs. Aware of its unblinking red eye I follow Becky into her room,...

Digitopia: networked computers and the American Dream.
February 1, 1998... While the celebration of technology and progress remains a central characteristic of historical modernism, we are seeing a further permutation of these familiar forms of futurism. Increasingly, liberalists and radical social reformers are turning...

Governing by computers: and drowning by numbers.
February 1, 1998... The use of technology in government has proliferated over the last few decades, particularly with the advance of computer technology. We are seeing the development of an increasingly high-tech government. Over the last few years I have been...

A science fiction of abundance: the moral and political complexities of utopia.
February 1, 1998... In 1993, the American scholars Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky made a much discussed contribution to futurology with their book The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, Zones of Turmoil. Their theme is the economics and politics of scarcity. The book...

Alice missing in Wonderland. (poem)
February 1, 1998... Each day below the pallid eye of winter noon there hangs a net of gulls. It obscures the day moon, forgotten as porcelain or the delicate need for tragedy. Grass, come morning, weeps away the...

Journeys of reconciliation. (Australian politics)
February 1, 1998... The wave of creative inspiration and self-confidence among indigenous people which followed Mabo found lively expression in places where traditional ownership and custom remain strong. In Cape York Peninsula, for example, Aboriginal landowners...

Indigenous 'stunts' abroad. (Australian involvement in global civil rights)
February 1, 1998... Cultural Comment appears regularly in Arena Magazine. By way of a range of brief interpretive comments it seeks to convey a sense of the transformation of Australian life and experience within a globalising world, both in framing values and in...

Here in winter, gone in summer: insulate your university with casual staff!
February 1, 1998... The expansion of the higher education sector in Australia over the last fifteen years has been achieved without a proportionate increase in revenue. One of the ways in which universities have insulated themselves from the effects of declining...

Howard's albatross: buying jobs and fudging figures. (Australian Prime Minister John Howard)
February 1, 1998... On 4 May, 1994, if you can remember back that far, the Prime Minister, then a bloke called Keating, promised every long-term unemployed person a job. `In each full year,' the Keating person declared, `around 160,000 jobs will be offered'. This...

The uncivil politics of law and order: is there a difference between state violence and public crime?
February 1, 1998... Governments and politicians these days are on constant alert, tuned to their political standing on the crime question. Many appear to relish any opportunity to display their populist credentials by adopting harsh law-and-order measures. Political...

Whose friend are you? A question of strategic alignment.
February 1, 1998... The US arms embargo on Iran has failed to foil Iran's drive for greater military might. The sale of Russian SS-4 missile technology to Iran took place in early 1997 in spite of concerted efforts by the US administration to prevent it. Russian...

Slow Reckoning: The Ecology of a Divided Planet.
February 1, 1998... Tom Athanasiou, Slow Reckoning: the ecology of a divided planet, Secker & Warburg, London, 1997. And if the Earth's not cold, Well everything is gonna burn We'll all take turns... `Monkey gone to heaven', The Pixies How are we to understand...

Social Theory and the Environment.
February 1, 1998... David Goldblatt, Social Theory and the Environment, Polity, Cambridge, 1996. And if the Earth's not cold, Well everything is gonna burn We'll all take turns... `Monkey gone to heaven', The Pixies How are we to understand the causes of...

FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture.
February 1, 1998... George Robertson et al. (eds), Future-Natural: nature, science, culture, Routledge, London, 1996. And if the Earth's not cold, Well everything is gonna burn We'll all take turns... `Monkey gone to heaven', The Pixies How are we to...

The Origins of Virtue.
February 1, 1998... Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue, Penguin UK, 1996. Released in paperback in Australia in December 1997. In some ways, an appropriate response to Matt Ridley's The Origins Of Virtue is to ignore it. The frequent laxness of its scholarship,...

The Clever Country? Australia's Digital Future.
February 1, 1998... The Clever Country? Australia's Digital Future, Daniel Petre and David Harrington, Lansdown Publishing, Sydney, 1996. In the 1990s, the Internet--also known as the information superhighway--has been in the vanguard of the information and...

Asleep at the Wheel: Australia on the Superhighway.
February 1, 1998... Asleep at the Wheel: Australia on the Superhighway, John Nieuwenhuizen, ABC Books, Sydney, 1997. In the 1990s, the Internet--also known as the information superhighway--has been in the vanguard of the information and communications revolution....

Great Apes.
February 1, 1998... Will Self, Great Apes, Bloomsbury, 1997. Will Self's latest novel presents itself as a satire on the concept of humanity. The very essence of corporeality and its relation to our basic sense of identity is indeed a popular anti-humanist trope....