Joel Deane

Joel Deane reviews 'Rupert Murdoch: An investigation of political power' by David McKnight

March 2012, no. 339 • 27 February 2012

 It is a thought-provoking photograph. In 1988, during the bicentenary of The Times, Rupert Murdoch and Queen Elizabeth are pictured sitting at a news conference within the inner sanctum of the London broadsheet. Mogul and monarch are at arm’s length – she, straight-backed, legs crossed, hands gathered together above her lap; he, leaning forward and slightly to his right, towards her, wit ... (read more)

Joel Deane reviews 'The Sweet Spot: How Australia made its own luck – and could now throw it all away' by Peter Hartcher and 'The Fog On The Hill: How NSW Labor lost its way' by Frank Sartor

December 2011–January 2012, no. 337 • 25 November 2011

On 7 November, Paul Keating appeared on ABC TV’s 7.30 to promote his new book of speeches,  After Words. Keating’s response to Leigh Sales’s first question about political leadership was instructive: Keating: Leadership’s always been about two main things – imagination and courage. Imagination to divine a bigger schematic, a bigger world and then having the political equipment to g ... (read more)

Joel Deane reviews 'Punch and Judy: The double disillusion election of 2010' by Mungo MacCallum

November 2010, no. 326 • 01 November 2010

The 2010 federal election fell on my wife’s birthday: 21 August. Being political tragics, we didn’t stop for birthday cake. Instead, we handed out roughly 1600 how-to-vote cards for the Australian Labor Party in suburban Melbourne. Our local polling booth is the Vista Valley Kindergarten, in Bulleen. This kindergarten cum polling booth, which sits in more of a gully than a valley and offers no ... (read more)

‘A bomb in every download: Julian Assange against the world’ by Joel Deane

May 2011, no. 331 • 27 April 2011

On 30 July 2010, WikiLeaks uploaded a file named ‘insurance.aes256’ to the Internet. The file was 1.4 gigabytes in size – large enough to hold a mountain of leaked documents – and encrypted with a 256-character key strong enough to have the US National Security Agency’s approval for use to secure classified documents. It was also copied to dozens of USB sticks and mailed out to a cadre o ... (read more)

Joel Deane reviews 'The Art of Great Speeches and Why We Remember Them' by Dennis Glover

March 2011, no. 329 • 14 April 2011

At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. So said President Barack Obama at a m ... (read more)

Joel Deane reviews 'Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era' (Quarterly Essay 40) by George Megalogenis and 'The Party Thieves: The Real Story of the 2010 Election' by Barrie Cassidy

December 2010–January 2011, no. 327 • 30 November 2010

Political writers are much like their sports-writing cousins. Most simply tell it as they see it, recounting the highs and lows of the game, the winners and losers, the statistics and scoreline. Some – courtesy of a flair for language, a well-stocked contacts book, or the perspective that comes from being a former player or a veteran observer – have the ability to place the reader in the goal ... (read more)