Opinion

The year is now 2020. 14 years ago, I started this site as I was planning a move from Melbourne to Sydney. Previously, I’d been publishing on a friend’s server, buried in a subfolder, but that’s when the site came into its own. So now, with this post, I’ll have published items in 3 different decades - ain’t that a thing about getting old. Right from the start, this site has been about my own political observations - one of the very first things written here was about the Cronulla Race Riot in December 2005, a decidedly unwelcome event for someone just about to move to the city. ...

This thinkpiece is opinion with some small basis in researched reality, but please don’t take this as definitive. All my own views. The argument being made in the US post-Trump and in the UK post-Brexit is that the forces of globalisation and free trade have led to increasing inequality, and that’s what the working class of these countries is getting upset about - their increasing distance from the “elite” that are perceived to benefit from the globalisation at the cost of the working class. ...

And so at long last, we reach US Election Day 2016, when a reckoning has finally come for the American political system - the candidates perfectly set up as the establishment facing the insurgents, the know-nothing Donald Trump squaring off against the know-it-all Hillary Clinton. How did we get like this? How did we get from the point where once upon a time, a candidate that was even threatened with being revealed to be cheating on his wife, would step back, stand down, or resign altogether than face the music, to the point where we’re seeing a candidate standing despite those accusations and worse being thrown around, and still he appears to be as close as a 3% gap? ...

Scott McIntyre, a sports reporter for SBS news, was sacked this weekend for tweets about the ANZACs - McIntyre began his tweets on the centenary of the Gallipoli landings by criticising what he said was the “cultification (sic) of an imperialist invasion”. He was called out by Malcolm Turnbull, and many reacting online. SBS News’ managing director had him out the door practically before it even became a news story. But: is he that far wrong? And what value free speech? ...

Rachel Olding and Nick Ralston in the Sydney Morning Herald today take a hatchet to males in their mid 20s in their profile of Vincent Stanford, the 24 year old accused of murdering Stephanie Scott: The reclusive school cleaner had no known friends, no social media profiles and had uttered little more than a polite “hello” to neighbours in Maiden Avenue. But Mr Stanford maintained a secret online life, hiding behind fantasy characters to indulge his obsession with computer games, violent videos and neo-Nazi propaganda. ...