And so we go into the first long night of the CPRS bill. The deal has been done, with enough Liberal Senators giving the Government the numbers to extend sitting hours late into tonight and all the way into next week if necessary.
One moment last week sums up why I wouldn’t swap this job for anything. At about 11am on Tuesday morning the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts (ECA) Committee is confronted with an unusual sight in the Felton Valley, about 20 km south of Oakey on the Darling Downs in southern Queensland. A crowd of people have taken over the road; a sea of green T-shirts and triangular yellow placards, kids lined up with banners, hand-made signs; all the essentials for a home-grown demonstration.
Net filtering got a run in senate question time again yesterday. See if you can spot the difference:
The September sittings opened and closed with unplanned symmetry. Opened with a line in the desert sand drawn by Aboriginal elders refusing any further compromise with the uranium miners. Closed with the tabling of a meticulous two hundred page manifesto for the rapid abolition of nuclear weapons, signed by the ALP, the Greens and the Coalition.
It’s rare to hear the phrase “war on terror” these days — it has been seemingly purged from the official lexicon as the superficial certainty of the Bush/Howard years gives way to darker and more ambiguous terrain. Australia is still a nation at war: one and a half thousand troops on the ground in Afghanistan, backing NATO’s installation of a brittle democracy in a violent failed state where the distinctions between friend and terrorist change by the day. But something is going on at home as well: a determined, coordinated expansion of the internal security estate that is permanently
August 6th is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima. I’ve just spent four days in a city where the memories are not only fresh, but engraved in stone, protected in world heritage-listed monuments, and taught urgently to young and old, local and foreign alike. The Japanese have a word for the survivors of the twin atomic attacks on August 6 and 9, 1945. They call them Hibakusha, those for whom nuclear weapons signify something other than peace marches.
On a dusty street in Lhasa, Tibet, a demonstration has gone bad. Tensions have been escalating for days; murmured opposition and spontaneous flashes of dissent spreading and finally igniting mass demonstrations from the Capital to every regional centre in Tibet. The security forces have been observing, documenting, falling back as numbers have grown.
spend a couple of hours with the people responsible for the health and integrity of country threatened by a radioactive waste dump and the issue takes on a crystal clarity. this written in a rage on the way back to canberra from darwin…
“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet” William Gibson. Take a drive an hour south through the rapidly expanding growth corridor fusing Perth to Mandurah, and you’ll fly past a road sign at once hopeful and heartbreaking.