Arena Magazine articles from February 2002

Arena Magazine archives from February 2002

The terror pretext; the ALP and asylum seekers. (editorial).(Australian Labour Party)(Editorial)
February 1, 2002... With the final assault on Tora Bora, and the installation of a new Afghan government, the first part of the `war on terror' has come to resemble the Hollywood movies of an era prior to those of the `Die Hard' tradition -- which can now be seen...

The battle for Kashmir: do we have to wait for a war to bring these politicians to their senses?(Pakistan)
February 1, 2002... Despite pleas of the new pro-Western regime, Afghanistan is still being bombed. Innocent people die every day. Osama bin Laden is still at large, but attention has already shifted to Pakistan. The destabilising effects of the war in Afghanistan...

Understanding digital television: digital television has the potential to increase participation and diversity in the media. The current regulatory framework ensures that this potential is unlikely to be realised. (against the current).
February 1, 2002... Digital television has been hailed as the means by which the information revolution will be carried into everyday life. Existing interests focussed around narrow channels of distribution will be overcome as a multitude of sources of...

Decolonising coffee: a free East Timor grapples with the free market. (against the current).
February 1, 2002... The town of Old Ermera is perched along a steep mountain ridge blanketed either side by Arabica coffee plants The district, a few hours on winding mountain roads south of Dili, produces about half the nation's coffee crop. Introduced by the...

Greenhouse sceptics and the assault on science: in order to challenge the evidence for the Greenhouse effect, sceptics have been forced to take on the nature of modern scientific thought itself. (against the current).
February 1, 2002... In 1870, Alfred Wallace, co-discoverer of Evolution, accepted a challenge to prove the roundness of the Earth to John Hampden, a committed Flat Earther. The question of the shape of the Earth had been settled for some educated people almost...

The road to Honiara: between the head man and the gangs, the Solomon Islands are set for more unrest. (against the current).
February 1, 2002... It was 1996, and I was sitting in a hotel bar in Auki, the capital of Malaita Province in the Solomon Islands. The satellite television in the corner beamed in `MTV Hawaiian Beach Party' which consisted of scantily clad Gold Coast Girls, as the...

Alex Millmow ... the quiet death of Australian economics. (letters and debate).
February 1, 2002... University economics in this country is barely eighty years old, yet it is facing an alarming slide into irrelevance. For ten years secondary school and university enrolments in economics have been in recession, so to speak. The economics...

The role of the state ... Steve Wright and Angela Mitropoulos extend the discussion. (letters and debate).
February 1, 2002... Recent issues of Arena Magazine have hosted a useful -- if at times oblique -- debate about the role of the state. This is no idle discussion. What is at stake here can easily be discerned by noting, as one example, the federal government's...

Race Mathews ... the third way and its critics. (letters and debate).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Chris Scanlon's anxieties are misplaced. The Third Way thinking set out by Mark Latham and Peter Botsman in their The Enabling State is an attempt not to supplant conventional social-democracy but to correct an imbalance within it. There is no...

Robert Corcoran ... labor -- a better way. (letters and debate).
February 1, 2002... Whatever our individual reactions to Christopher Scanlon's ideas may be, his stimulating contribution on the future of Labor in the December-January Arena Magazine should prompt all of us on the Labor side of politics to ponder and discuss...

Commonsense and the ALP: now is the time for labor to rediscover what political imagination is for. (features).(Australian Labour Party)
February 1, 2002... When the election was over and the smoke cleared on November 11 -- never a really good day for Labor -- the Australian Labor Party began a process of re-examination which may or may not prove to be real and genuinely transforming. As the...

In the name of freedom: is the legacy of September 11 a global anti-liberal ascendancy? (features).
February 1, 2002... In the four months since September 11 and the destruction of the World Trade Centre the United States has largely ended the first phase of its `war' against terror. In this it has notched up some definite successes. It has destroyed the Taliban...

Black Caesar: our first bushranger was a six-foot African man who arrived on the first fleet. What does his life tell us about the quest for identity in contemporary Australia? (essay).
February 1, 2002... The big book in Australia for 2001 was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a masterful portrait of our national hero which won Carey his second Booker Prize and stimulated a bonanza in Kelly myth-making. Of course, there are those who...

Vessel.(Poem)
February 1, 2002... Because another day brings to light what another day brings, the anchor gripped for a second then slipped, and nothing of any consequence happened. Because the motion must be constant, because the motion subsumes all that comes in...

Disintegrasi: Indonesia in the post-Suharto era.
February 1, 2002... Since at least the late 1980s, ecological justice activists have been drawn with growing concern to the plight of Borneo's indigenous Dayaks. Logging and mining corporations have ravaged Dayak forests and polluted Dayak rivers so badly that...

Dirty Harry and u: long after the wars have ended, the hero's weapons, coated in depleted uranium, lie waiting to kill again.
February 1, 2002... Whatever happened to depleted uranium? During the Gulf War and the conflicts in Yugoslavia, the long-term problems associated with its use were extensively discussed. In the wake of the war in Afghanistan it seems to have disappeared...

Polarising Pell: the Catholic Church needs unity and diversity to achieve communion.(Archbishop George Pell, Australia)
February 1, 2002... In November, 2001 Pope John Paul II delivered an `exhortation' to the Catholic Church in the Pacific region, where `the sea and the land, the water and the earth meet in endless ways' and its mosaic of peoples `are struggling for unity and...

The poverty taboo: Australia is one of the most economically divided OECD countries. Why, then, are governments reluctant to talk about it?(Statistical Data Included)
February 1, 2002... Australia is a deeply divided rich-get-richer nation, in which both the winners and losers of almost two decades of economic and social upheaval are baffled and angry at the destruction of a fair go society. (Weekend Australian, 17 June 2000)....

Your call is important to us: call centres, technology and the future of work.(corporations outsource call center services)
February 1, 2002... The call taker at the bank, or your store card or telecommunications company call centre may indeed answer in the name of Susan or Mark. The polished, difficult-to-define accent may give you no clue that your call that originated in the United...

Labour's capital: individual or collective? An alternative to the shareholder society.
February 1, 2002... Are we becoming a nation of shareholders? In broad terms, the proportion of Australian households owning shares has increased from about one in five two decades ago to about one in two today. This is a prodigious rate of growth. The lion's...

Douglas McQueen-Thomson on Shakespeare in our time.(interpreting three plays by Shakespeare, Australia)
February 1, 2002... In 1965 Polish critic Jan Kott famously asked if Shakespeare was our contemporary. In a period of deep political and social upheaval, not just in Eastern Europe, Kott wanted to know how Shakespeare's plays could possibly be relevant in a...

Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: the Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences.
February 1, 2002... Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences, Annandale, Pluto Press, 2001. In Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences, Steve Keen has written an enormously challenging and stimulating...

Blue Army: Paramilitary Policing in Australia.
February 1, 2002... Having grown up in Northern Ireland, where paramilitary policing dominates almost every aspect of law enforcement and is synonymous with the oppression and death of many innocent citizens (both Catholic and Protestant), to read of a trend...

There's a lot of it about. (Rope).
February 1, 2002... `... we should mourn the loss of the American Spectator, a lively little magazine of the intelligent Right which was destroyed by the increasing megalomania of its editor...' Editorial, Quadrant, January- February 2002

Yeah, those damn anti-Nazi PC Nazis. (Rope).
February 1, 2002... `[Leni] Riefenstahl, who is an embarrassment to all politically correct Germans and refuses to dissociate herself from her past, is using the interest generated by the film [the documentary Underwater Impressions] to give her version of how the...

And they claim to have a non-penal past. (Rope).
February 1, 2002... `Adelaide has been the worst year of my life... Nelson Mandela had his 27 years on Robben Island; I've had my year in Adelaide.' Peter Sellars, former artistic director of the Adelaide Festival, quoted Michael Shmith, `Sellars: Saint or...

Amazing he's still getting work. (Rope).
February 1, 2002... `Sellar's resignation is only the latest in a string of problems. There was the $1 million deficit from the 2000 Adelaide Festival... then came the recent use of Adolf Hitler in television commercials...' Michael Shmith, `Sellars: Saint...

Must have own boat and trailer. (Rope).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Male 51 decrepit burned out bookish recluse seeks poetic communication with females who can relish an ambient mix of romantic gothic punk surrealist preraphaelite cities, forests, galaxies, Guinevere and Annabel Lee. London Review of...

Let them eat cake. (Rope).
February 1, 2002... `I'm not keen on it, and not because I'm a snooty rich person -- I am neither snooty nor rich. It's not an appropriate thing to happen here. Margaret Clunies Ross, Professor of English at Sydney University, and resident of the Astor, in...

How unlike the home life of our own dear mongrels. (Rope).
February 1, 2002... `During a visit by King Vajiravudh to the prison in Nakhon Pathom, his eyes happened to glance upon two cute puppies... to the delight of the puppies' owner who immediately presented the King with one of them: Ya-ley. As he grew up Ya-ley...