There’s no point posting most of the post-mortem links I gathered after the election, but here’s a few that stuck.
Paul Mason: Labour haven’t just failed to win—it’s worse than that.
John Prescott: Labour lost the election 5 years ago.
Inside the Milibunker: the last days of Ed.
Six reasons you don’t want to be George Osborne right now.
The arguments against the Human Rights Act are coming. They will be false.
I grew up thinking of Malcolm Fraser and Australia’s Liberal Party as the bad guys, a view which only became stronger when I immersed myself in 1975 lore as a political science student in the late 1980s. When Gough Whitlam died last year, I lost a hero. Once I would as happily have danced on Fraser’s grave as on Margaret Thatcher’s.
But while Thatcher’s legacy in Britain becomes more toxic by the year, Fraser’s is more benign. His government presided over some positive changes—welcoming Vietnamese refugees, establishing SBS, opposing apartheid and white minority rule in Rhodesia, and the Northern Territory Land Rights Act—and saw through some of what Gough started. I’ll never approve of what he did in 1975, although I attach most of the blame to Governor-General Sir John Kerr for cravenly going along with it. Dismantling Medibank was a blot on his copybook as well, as was making a minister of John Howard. But after his time as prime minister he did and said a lot worth admiring.
David Pope’s cartoon in the Canberra Times captured it best. I love his reference to the old jokes about how Fraser looked like an Easter Island statue, too.
Time to relinquish the rage.
A few final links on Charlie Hebdo I missed before, plus some further thoughts first posted in the giant Metafilter thread about them.
Je suis Charlie? It’s a bit late.
“All eyes are on us, we’ve become a symbol.”
How the “survival issue” was made.
“It’s okay, you’re alive, you’ll be able to keep drawing me.”
My first reaction to the events in Paris this week was, obviously, dismay, not just that this depressing drumbeat of the 21st century was still sounding, but that this time the target was a satirical magazine, an enterprise close to my heart. My only previous exposure to Charlie Hebdo had been seeing it at magazine stands in French-speaking countries, but I knew it was something like the French Private Eye, and that was enough to empathize with the French people’s reaction to, not just an act of terror, but an attack on a beloved national institution.
22 May 2015
Read More
Politics in 2014