Travelling Feminist: Milada Horáková

Dr Milada Horáková was a lawyer and active campaigner for social justice for all of her life. She was imprisoned both by the Gestapo and by the Communists (which is a more common pairing than you might expect – neither the Nazis or the Communists liked people who fought against tyranny). But it was the Communists [...]

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The smell of gunpowder

It’s New Year’s Eve in Munich, and we’ve just gone for a stroll in the fading winter light. Everywhere around us was the smell of gunpowder. From the small stash of fireworks we bought at the supermarket that morning, and were attempting, at great risk, to light despite not understanding the German instructions. From the [...]

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The consent of the governed

Reading last week’s Economist editorial about the crisis in Thailand, I was struck by this statement: Democracy works only when the parties that lose an election accept the outcome. It seemed a cautionary comment about the state of politics in the US at the moment. And reading this column from Paul Krugman added to that [...]

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Questions about Children, safety and freedom

Jody at Raising Weg has answered some really interesting questions from Amber at American Family about changing parenting norms, and how we trade off safety and freedom – it’s clearly changed, but how and why? This is something I think a lot about, so I’m going to answer them here. Chatterboy and Hungry Boy are 7 and 5. 1) [...]

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Momentous

Watching the Obama Inauguration, from a country deeply affected by American politics, but still outside it, has been wonderful (although I have to admit that 3 am was just too early for me to watch it live). But reading Elizabeth at Half Changed World’s description of actually being there has reminded me of the one [...]

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Moral majority?

I’ve written before about how annoying I find the rules about religious education in NSW public schools. In 1880, the NSW government established the Public Instruction Act, which introduced compulsory free education in NSW. In a compromise with the (non catholic) religious schools, the government also took over most of the poor, parish schools. As [...]

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Book Review: Immigrants – Your country needs them

Today’s book review is Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, by Philippe Legrain. Legrain is a British journalist (but with a complex heritage involving Estonia, the US and France) who started writing this book just after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London. The book’s introduction is titled “It’s time for fresh thinking about immigration”, and it [...]

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The Rules

There was a story last week about how the new government has issued a directive that major statutory agencies (for example the CSIRO, ANSTO and Questacon) will not issue any “strategic media releases which relate to the Government’s key messages” unless they have been vetted by the government – specifically the office of Kim Carr, Minister [...]

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Jury again

One of the reasons (apart from general laziness) that I didn’t do Globlopomo is that I was called for Jury service for a month starting today. But I’m posting now because I got off. I got as far as sitting in the jury box of a trial of someone for sexual assault. To my great relief, [...]

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Senate voting

I’ve always been one of the 4% of voters (Antony Green) who voted “below the line” in the Senate*. Every person who admits to sharing this obscure habit always comes back to one reason, “I wanted to vote [XXX] last”. So this year, with the release of the Senate ballot paper (NSW here), I thought [...]

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