We have a corrupt, hard right-wing Liberal government, led by self-seeking hypocrites. We have a weakened right-wing Labor opposition. And we have a country, once great, now seen as selfish, greedy and cruel and we have no political leadership at all.
Julian Burnside
August 3, 2018
Conservatism in Australia is indeed in crisis. The reputation of its two constitutive institutions - the churches and the banks - have been greatly tarnished by royal commissions, just as another royal commission has failed to discredit the trade union movement. Climate science and the population's growing environmental awareness have also pulled the rug from under yet another pillar of conservatism: extractive industries, especially coal mining, on which the country's wealth depends.
A. Dirk Moses
August 3, 2018
Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.
Kofi Annan
July 20, 2018
I think it’s a Prime Minister’s duty; one of the primary duties of a Prime Minister is to protect the country from prejudice. Howard was happy to let the racism virus out. And it’s like a flu virus, you never get it back. You know, when someone at the top of the system…you see Bob before me, Malcolm Fraser before him, Gough Whitlam, John Gorton – none of us would play around with this issue. None. The only one to do it was a little guy from Bennelong.
Paul Keating
July 17, 2018
Complain about wage theft, cuts in penalty rates, and low wages, and the government will feign concern. However, this is what they want; to create an unemployed, underemployed and poorly paid underclass to serve their corporate donors. The want to turn Australia into a copy of the United States where the rich get very rich and the poor can get stuffed.
John Laurie
July 16, 2018
The United States Congress, the avatar of the democratically elected national legislatures in the modern world, is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.
Al Gore
July 15, 2018
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
July 15, 2018
What’s under attack at the moment isn’t individual facts… although they are under attack…it’s the very notion of truth that’s under attack. When a politician lies in the morning and then contradicts his lie with another lie in the afternoon, what they’re saying to you, finally, is that no truth matters, and truth itself is unimportant. And if truth doesn’t matter, all we are left with is opinion. And if all we’re left with is opinion, the opinion that will prevail is the opinion of the most powerful and the most wealthy. And then we have gone to a very dark place.
Richard Flanagan
July 10, 2018
When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, we are being ruled by criminals.
Susan Munday
July 10, 2018
I’m not critical of our democratic system; I’m critical of the people who are the incumbents, and their failure to manifest any sense of responsibility towards this society. It is they who don’t believe in democracy, it is they who are not assuming their responsibility as leaders. It is they who are not finding ways of either addressing our problems, or looking at the problems that are coming….and they are coming very rapidly at us.
