This is getting very complicated. Maybe they should stop trying to silence each other and start listening to each other. Both, neither, or one of these people might have trash views and ways of expressing those views, but if the board has already signed off on the invitation to the festival, then they need to back that decision. Only something quite heinous coming to light should demand a reconsideration.

Also if all these super smart people on these high flying boards can’t find a way to strip away the power imbalances brought by personal connections at a writer’s festival and provide a fair space for expression, then I’m worried for the meritocracy of the way board positions are given…

We need a society that once more values its dreamers and visionaries, those who uncomfortably go against the grain of what and who we are, exploring our nightmares so we might better know ourselves and create new dreams that reveal other ways of being. Not so much underfunded and undervalued as unsupported and despised, our future artists are the key to building the social fibre that will sustain a healthy, resilient and successful Australia

Feels like he’s talking his book, so to speak. I’m not against supporting the arts, but theres a lot out there thats just a waste. Like those government grants that are awarded are so often filled by some schmuck who just wants an easy pay day.

Another reason i think he’s talking his book a bit too much is that he’s made this fairly flimsy claim about arts being the social fibre of a nation as opposed to sports being the sugar high. I don’t know, they both seem pretty sugary to me, the fibre has to be in the strength of connections in the contextual communities of the individuals in that nation.

Couldn’t agree more with you’re assessment. I’m more hopeful Australia can pull its finger out its arse with military manufacturing.

Yes we’ve shut down an insane amount of primarily manufacturing based industries, (eg cars, thanks Liberals, ya dumb cunts!), the mining and construction industries have a large amount of incidental manufacturing for repairs and unique materials, while our knowledge base from universities and the small military-industrial machine puts us in a okay position to ramp up onshore production of many items, not too mention our wealth and borrowing capacity.

But we will need to relinquish the neoliberal monetary policy only choke-hold on our economy, and allow fiscal spending to direct a greater proportion of our economy than we’ve seen in most of our lifetimes.

I also think while NATO and Europe should always be kept on friendly terms, we need to invest in our neighbours. We may recieve support from far off allies, but those commitments may only go so far. See the British decision to desert the region after Singapore in WW2 for an example of the limitations of far off allies.

So strong allies in our region including Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Pacific Islands countries et al, that are bound to us through geography, and we to them can bring a deeper/different form of mutual defence commitment. Its time for Oceania as a region to become a more serious idea.

Yet, with all your typing, you make my point for me… in the thick of it aren’t they.

Don’t trip over those double standards.

Could just as easily say those posts are related to, or in response to things Zionists have done. But hey, they’re special little princes and princesses, we can’t criticise their role in all these. 👑

Its laughable the willingness to turn a blind eye to the other very active, and at this time more malicious interlocutor group.

The writer had some fun with it for sure!

Oh my! I’m not sure how you mean that! 😂

• Is that a dig at the UK for getting bullied to take chlorinated chicken from the US?

• A dig at their privatised water shemozzle?

• An obscure WW1 chlorine gas reference (this ones my over-active imagination for sure! 😂)

Or,

• just that its a dirty place that needs more cleaning!

You’ve made an assumption that everybody today has that original view of Israel. Even though it’s historic origins aren’t disputed, its important to veer away from dangerous generalisations like this as much as possible, its what genocides are made of. Stopping ourselves from making generalisations about whole populations means we can always maintain the ability to comprehend the contextual nuances of one another, something I fear too many in Israel itself refuse to apply to Palestinians, but not all.

Take Australia: Australia was a settler colonial penal colony. The world turned and the idea of what it would be then, is not necessarily what it is today. And importantly, its not what lots of Australians now believe about their country. Some people may think its still a settler colonial penal colony. The history certainly shows some peoples such as Aborigines have a more than fair claim to still believe that, but theres others that believe its a US satellite state, and yet others again who believe we are young and free.

My point is, a country is made up of multitudes. No matter what a country’s founding beliefs are, they’re gona change, some will cleave to those beliefs, but others will see their country in a vastly different ways to the founders, and as their lives are lived the face of a nation will change, for better or worse.

So historically yes that was it’s intention, and likely still has many subscribers to that intention. But, we can’t assume that is everybody who believes Israel should exist, or the only reason driving that belief.

I thought that to. I think genevaconvenience has made a logical assumption, that Israel and Zionism are 1 to 1. This might not be correct especially for the individual who may know more or less about the origins of Zionism, and the Israeli State and yet have strong connections there.

For instance, I have strong family connections to NSW but when I go there, the place as a whole feels quite different culturally.

I’m goona go with, high court challenge would likely be successful if you can demonstrate the law in practice is a defacto ban.

Oof. Rough, but fair.

I think the degree of movement Tim Dunlop thinks Labor has on any given issue at any one time is vastly overestimated. Degree of movement is the whole rationale behind incrementalism, and progressive Partys don’t have a wide degree due to the aggressive media and geopolitical environment they exist in.

Although Labor only just lost the 2019 election, they still lost it. Bringing on possibly the most damaging three years of Liberal/National strangulation of this country of that period.

I think Tim Dunlop underplays the importance of the old media in the new media landscape. Top 100 News & Politics YouTube Channels in Australia, dont know what the Burma channel is, but you get to 7, at Friendly Jordies, before you can argue you actually have anything left of centre. The old media isn’t as dominant as it was, but it still sets the agenda most often. And still has far reach across the voting public, enough to shape the hair brained narrative blaming the PM for the Bondi terror attack.

Thankfully independent media are growing in number, many are far more open to a non-billionaire alligned worldview. Some examples are,

• Guardian
• Ette media
• Independent aus
• Michael west
• Deep cut
• Crikey
• Urban wronsky
• Friendly jordies
• The shot
• The Klaxton
• John Menadue
• Cheek media
• Abby Dib
• Declassified
• Equator (monthly politics,culture, not sure if this fits.)
• Inside Story
• Antony Loewenstein

^Please reply if you know of more, i’ve been casually adding to this list, I don’t know yet to what end, but the degree of fragmentation is hurting these outlets, so I think some kind of public known central repository for readers to find these outlets would help.^

The geopolitical situation is an even larger challenge. There is an authoritarian shift in this world, and there is no reason to think Australia or any democracy can survive it. Author Sven Beckert apparently talks about this in his new book ‘Capitalism’ when he discusses the actual age of capitalism being older than the Industrial revolution in Britain, and capitalism surviving under many forms of governance, be it authoritarian, monarchist, democracy, dictatorship, there are many examples, democracy is just one, the best one, but just one.

So we can experience a significant degradation in our democracy without any significant effects on the capitalist system, just look to the USA to see this happening in real time.

For a country as small as Australia this shift poses a potentially existential risk to our Nation as we know. Whether we like it or not we are on a geopolitical tightrope. In 2025 the ‘Great Game’ as it was once called over a century ago before WW1 has been relaunched. Due to the growing power of nations like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar etc; but also through foolish and decadent policies of the USA and foolishly utopian policies of the Europeans.

Australia is completely linked to the US tech stack, financial stability relies on the US, our military and it’s technology are also dependent on the US. These are systemic structures you can’t change overnight except with a major and extremely costly break from our largest ally.

This restricts the types of overt or outwardly large movements to progressive policies that will be tolerated by our erstwhile and increasingly authoritarian allies and benefactors. A Machiavellian view and action and reaction framework is the only choice for Australia in this world. Luckily for us, we’ve already been practising this for the last decade or more between the maws of Chimerica.

Finally there are certain touch-stone issues such as housing that not enough Australians see a problem with yet to take significant action on. I can only hope that we can get a grand generational bargain on housing in this country before a government of any stripe does something so stupid as to open the market to the private investment houses, such as venture capital…

If they can get a representative sample then 1000 to 2000 is pretty good, and somewhat industry standard. Using statistical analyses on larger samples will only marginally improve quality of results. A key trick is to gain a representative enough sample, and 1000 to 2000 people tends to be enough to cover most segments/divisions of a population that are useful.

I’ve been reading the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov recently and its incredible how well he explained the predictability of large groups of humans. Modern statisticians are mostly a humble lot, having all been proved wrong many a time, but they all know that we can be fairly predictable on a population level. Listen to or read Nate Silver, Ben Raue, or Antony Green probably some of the most well known in our context of “Australians influenced heavily by US politics” all know they know things, but are fairly humble in their pronouncements about things, contrast this with lifestyle podcasters or most journalists and you’ll see what I mean.

To put another way, a lot of statistical analysis is built off averaging and predicting those measures of central tendencies, which after a certain size is reached vary little with more size, so once you reach a fair size sample the most important, and increasingly tricky part is finding its representative. I think a famous story of this is the readers digest polls who were famously highly reliable, until circulation or readership decreased and suddenly the reliability plummeted.

Yep, thats not a bad number to get for a poll.

I’m probably more worried about the speed in which they’ve put this together. So close to the event which they readily admit has made the results deviate from a normal results, which is the whole intention behind putting this out now. They can then assess the drop off in support as the event gets further back in time, and intervening events have their effect.

But the speed is also a concern because they’ve had to do this over the xmas period, when a lot more people are less available. So i have a concern about how representative they were able to make it. I’m sure they tried, resolve has a reasonable reputation for polling, but given the time period for responses it isn’t ideal.

16% of this Nation would be over 4 million people, so its possible both can be true.

You’re kidding!

For people wishing to contact the Prime Minister with your thoughts this is the communication channel indicated,

https://www.pm.gov.au/webform/contact_us/confirmation

These people are committing a genocide! And we’re inviting their head of State here?? What the actual fuck is wrong with us!

Why exactly! As soon as he steps off the plane he will be acting to divide this nation to the benefit of his own. This is an Australian tragedy, no matter the outside influences of the actors themselves we are talking about Australians. It would cost Labor politically, but he should not be allowed entry.

Edit: Wrote this comment before reading, they fuckin invited him!!

I’m not sure i’m willing to lay it all at conservatives feet though. I’ve been pretty unhappy with a lot of journalists coverage, like PK and Fran Kelly (and their guest in that first week), Chris Minns hasn’t acted judiciously with pronouncements.

I suppose my problem with your comment comes down to how to define conservatism. I have real trouble now viewing the ‘MAGA’ type reactionaries on the ‘right’ of politics as in any way conservative. There is so much they do smash, or want to break down, from environment, to institutions that traditional 19th or 20th century conservatism would be aghast at. Its some form of revanchivist radicalism so far largely undefined, but i think these people need to lose the conservative label though. So i suppose thats holding me back from agreeing with you more fully.