August 4 – 10, 2018
News
Comment
Comment
Mike Carlton
Fairfax and Turnbull’s Potemkin village
“Abandoning any political principle that had once been his ticket to ride, Turnbull now makes only a show of leadership. He’s the mayor of a Potemkin village. Behind the facade there is nothing. His impulses are Trump-lite: a reverence for the banks and the big end of town; a blind belief in neoliberal, trickle-down economics even as it is daily more discredited; a disdain for the disabled and disadvantaged, immigrants and refugees – anyone who does not fit the Darwinian conservative matrix. He has evidently abandoned any attempt to rein back the quasi-fascist ambitions of Benito and his furious construction of a security superstate to monitor us all.”
Comment
Sean Kelly
How Turnbull is stuck in reverse
“Turnbull vowed to look “very seriously and thoughtfully and humbly” at the results. Bill Shorten explicitly said “we hear you” to those who voted for third parties, and has spent the days since the vote repeating a version of this mea culpa: “We understand that you are over politicians just fighting each other.” Both are right to be concerned. But the need to win over voters who are turned off by major-party politics is a greater problem for Turnbull, for a simple reason: he is in government. Incumbency was once a great advantage. But the mood of the electorate, encouraged by a faster, louder media cycle, is for protest. The raison d’etre of an opposition is to protest: the times suit opposition leaders. ”
Letters, Cartoon & Editorial
Culture
Profile
Christie Whelan Browne’s theatrical life
Actress-singer Christie Whelan Browne catapulted to the attention of theatregoers at a young age, untrained but bursting with talent. Here, she talks about fate, timing and discovering a love of musical theatre. “I was the clown, I really made people laugh. Boys told me I was ugly … I used comedy to fit in.”
Visual Art
‘All We Can’t See’
All We Can’t See, an exhibition of works responding to the incident reports published as the Nauru Files, leaves the viewer deliberately overwhelmed in the face of the trauma it interrogates.
Portrait
Artist Pierre Mukeba
“Pierre Mukeba seems relaxed as he troubleshoots our video chat. He punctuates his sentences with a laugh, amiable and resonant. My own laugh – skewed and pulled apart by some glitch – translates as a hollow, metallic scrape. I can tell he’s studying my face, perhaps in search of life, or at least a reaction. I hope I am digitally intact. I make a point of smiling back right into my webcam.”
Food
Sea urchin with cultured butter and toast
“I treat sea urchins as you would an oyster. One or two portions at the beginning of a meal is one of the best ways to begin an evening. The warm buttered toast is a lovely complement.”
Books
Life
Travel
Borneo’s Gomantong Caves
Within Borneo’s Gomantong Caves – slippery with teeming insects, bird droppings and guano from two million bats – fine dining is likely far from the mind. But overhead a perilous harvest ensues for the key ingredient of Chinese bird’s nest soup.
The Quiz
Quotes
PLASTIC
“The price for having an opinion about the plastic bag ban reversal whilst being brown. Someone leaked my personal phone number and all night I received calls from strangers threatening to kill me and abusing me.”
The ABC journalist is harassed after tweeting about the Coles about-face on its plastic bag ban. A rare opportunity to combine Australia’s national pastimes, racism and feckless consumption.
INTERNET
“ ‘Wait a second. You’re saying if I go on the computer, on the world wide web, there are people having sex?’ ”
The director recounts the moment Tom Cruise discovered online pornography. The actor was even more shocked to learn that, unlike Scientology, you don’t even need to pay for it.
MILLENNIALS
“Maybe we need another war.”
The teen conservative says wartime rations taught a generation to make the most of what they had. A loathsome thought, although still a better idea than it was for him to grow a beard.
POLITICS
“She’s got very big questions to answer.”
The ACTU secretary calls for Senator Michaelia Cash’s resignation over the Australian Workers’ Union raid tipoffs. Cash’s only question was whether anyone had seen her whiteboard.
DIPLOMACY
“My wife is Japanese... my wife is Chinese. That’s a terrible mistake to make.”
Britain’s top diplomat forgets his wife’s nationality. And yet, he is, somehow, still the most competent foreign secretary Britain has had this year.
PRAGMATISM
“I was forced to strip down naked.”
The Labor whistleblower recounts his arrest, alongside 16 others, over the red shirts rort scandal to the media. With that image fresh in everyone’s mind, Finnigan also used the opportunity to announce he’ll run as an independent candidate for the seat of Footscray.
