Guy Rundle

Whatever happened to the men’s movement? Was it only a few years ago that we all gathered in the Dandenongs to bang drums, fashion spears, and – I quote from a flier advertising one such event – hug all night in ‘greased cuddle piles’. Now the tribes of management consultants, computer programmers and, well, wimps have retreated from view (to the chagrin of stand-up comedians everywhere) and the copies of Iron John litter the twenty cent tables of the second-hand bookstores.

Not long into the Obama era, the American comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted a high-profile ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ in Washington, DC. In front of an enormous crowd of well-intentioned liberals, Stewart made a case for a return to the sensible centre. ‘We live in hard times, not end times,’ he declared ...

Guy Rundle ends his engrossing account of Clive Palmer with a disclaimer: ‘Knowing Clive, he will contradict everything asserted in this essay in the two weeks between its going to press and hitting the bookstands.’ Since the publication of this essay, Palmer has not contradicted the assertions of the essay, but his party has been challenged. Senator Jacqui Lambie has resigned from the Palmer United Party. At the November Victorian election, preference deals led to the election of micro parties to the Upper House, without a Palmer United Party member.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

London 1999. I’m in a draughty slum in Hackney, the poor part of the East End, shared with a mini-UN of students, squatters, drifters and a junior investment banker. Feeding five-pound notes into the gas meter, keeping an eye out the window for the television licence detector van, we’re doing what everyone who comes to cool Britannia does most evenings – watching the BBC ‘cos we can’t afford to go to the pub. Suddenly, the screen seems to widen and there’s Sydney Harbour in all its luminescent glory, with an expert panel of worthies – Bob Hawke, Bill Hayden, Geoffrey Robertson – arrayed before it.

In the midst of transition to the information economy, there is a need for thinking about learning in ways that will help us to reconstruct the education system, while enhancing its critical and reflective role, and improving equality of opportunity. This new book by Mark Latham, a Labor MHR, isn’t it, though at first glance many will think it might be. Consciously or otherwise, it’s a substantial surrender to new Right ways of thinking. Worse, it’s intellectually sloppy and rife with obvious and unresolved contradictions.