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Australia’s house prices are running out of control (Guardian Oct 22 2013)

If we’re not careful, Melbourne and Sydney will become like London and Paris – places where the international super-rich grow their money while ordinary residents are priced out.

With Christine Milne at the helm, the Greens’ future is secure (SMH, October 9th 2013)

In the weeks following the Federal election the Greens have been subject to a rising tide of media-fuelled speculation focused on the departure of staff and a lowered election vote as evidence the party is in decline and the leadership of Christine Milne is under threat.

How Green power beat the Abbott/Murdoch push (The Age Sept 9 2013)

When Tony Abbott made the ”captain’s call” to put the Greens last in Liberal preference flows, many people thought he had sounded the death knell for the Greens’ chances of ever again holding a seat in the lower house. But at Adam Bandt’s election-night party in a West Melbourne warehouse on Saturday, a different story unfolded.

Angry about government surveillance? The joke’s on us (The Age June 12 2013)

Our protests sound hollow as we willingly sacrifice our privacy on social media. While there are good grounds to criticise governments for security overreach and for spying on the online behaviour of citizens, there is also a point at which citizens need to take some responsibility for their own privacy.

‘Cashed-up sheep’ need to get their activism together (The Age, June 8 2013)

In Australia in 2013 we are in danger of allowing progressive movements to descend into indulging the superficial, self-adulating impression of activism, rather than actually posing any kind of tangible threat to anyone. 

Eurovision: why Aussies lap up a good cheesefest (Sydney Morning Herald, May 20 2013)

Eurovision is the contest the world loves to hate. And Australians are not immune. There is something tantalisingly egalitarian about Eurovision that ignores the usual geopolitical hierarchies of Europe.

Someone tell Australia that gay marriage is inevitable (ABC Drum, April 5th, 2013)

The tide of history is turning in favour of gay marriage, but in Australia our political and religious leaders seem stuck in the past. The question now is how long those pushing the anti-equality bandwagon will be able to hold out before they do irrevocable damage to the institutions they represent.

Greens go back to their roots (Australian Financial Review, February 20th, 2013)

Christine Milne’s National Press Club appearance was a milestone in the personal and political evolution of the Greens leader as she announced the power sharing agreement between her party and Labor was dead in the water.

Left to my own devices, I’m tweets ahead (The Sunday Age, January 6th, 2013)

HERE’S a new year’s question – how many times a day do you check your email and ”check in” to social media? According to my calculations, I am probably doing it close to 70 times a day. Or more.

Paler shade of Green still a vivid player (The Age, December 28, 2012)

THE news that the Australian Greens are ”softening” their positions on official party policy should not come as a surprise. This is merely the course of action any serious progressive party would take to secure its future on the eve of an election year and in the face of a largely hostile media.

‘Trapped in the web?’ (The Punch, October 2012)

It’s difficult to feel anything but revulsion when pondering the case of former ABC Collectors host Andy Muirhead’s dramatic and public fall from grace. As Kate Legge noted in her lengthy piece in The Weekend Australian Magazine ‘Child pornography sickens to the core’.

‘Gone! Greed gorges property market’ (The Punch, September 2012)

On any weekend in one of Australia’s cities, in what has become something of a ritualistic right of passage for aspiring home-owners, crowds of eagle-eyed punters gather on suburban curb sides hoping to secure themselves a slice of residential security, or at least to get a whiff of which way the fickle winds of the housing market are blowing.

 ‘What Batman can teach us about a nuclear free future’ (The Punch, August 2012) 

The Dark Knight Rises, the last and final instalment in Christopher Nolan’sBatman series, packs a serious punch. For almost three hours audiences are held captivated by the reluctant return of the Caped Crusader to save Gotham City from a neo-fascist Nemesis in the guise of the megalomaniacal Bane. The political subtexts are not standard Hollywood fodder.

‘Attacks on the Greens will come back to bite them’ (ABC Drum, July 2012)

The thing that constantly shocks me is that some people seem to resent the Greens for their success. The game they are playing is called democracy – and yet every time the Greens out-manoeuvre the major parties on major electoral reforms they cop a barrage of criticism as though they are doing something wrong.

‘Bob Brown hikes off into his political sunset’ (Sunday Age, April 2012)

The first time I visited Bob’s old shack in Liffey in northern Tasmania, I was struck by the now famous sign on the front fence reading ”Trespassers Welcome”. Spending that night out there by myself I heard movement nearby and wondered if someone was in the back shed. I mentioned this to Brown when I saw him later and he confirmed that there was a homeless man camping out back.

‘Who wants to be a Milne hier?’ (The Punch April 2012)

Since the huge news of Bob Brown’s retirement last week, new leader Christine Milne has emerged as a leader just as canny as her predecessor, crafting her own stamp on the party leadership rather than walking in anyone’s shadow.

‘Greens are more than Brown’ (Australian Financial Review, April 2012)

Since the resignation of Bob Brown last week, the media has struggled to string together a coherent narrative as to where the Greens will go from here. To many observers, Brown was the Greens and without his commanding presence, the party will be left floundering.

‘Your taxes hard at work making mushroom clouds’ (The Punch, April 2012)

When David Gonski fronted up to his first day of work as the new Chairman of the Future Fund this week, he walked into a flurry of controversy from unexpected quarters.

‘Go Directly to jail. Do not pass year six’ (The Punch, February 2012)

In Texas and in many other parts of the US, the government has hit upon a neat new approach to dealing with troublesome students in schools. Instead of old-fashioned methods like detention or sitting in the corner of the classroom, the State has employed a legion of armed police to patrol the state’s school corridors.

‘Democratic freedoms under attack from Ferguson’ (ABC Drum, January 2012)

In Australia in 2012, it seems that all pernicious roads lead to Martin Ferguson. Whether it’s selling uranium to India, dumping radioactive waste on Indigenous people in the Northern Territory or spying on peaceful protesters – chances are it has his fingerprints all over it.

‘Stripped of civil liberties for a night on the town’ (The Punch, January 2012)

In case you hadn’t noticed, an increasing number of Australian bars and clubs are introducing security technology that would be more fittingly encountered in a Police state than a casual night out for a drink in one of Australia ‘s cities.

‘LA Zombie and a tale of two cities‘ (ABC Drum, November 2011)

I have heard it said that if Paris is the city of love, Berlin is the city of sex. Well, if recent events are anything to go by, Melbourne must be the city of prudishness and over-regulation of our cultural institutions.

‘A man addicted to his own self-image’ (The Australian, June 2011)

THERE are many instances throughout history when people have jumped to associate the rush on new technologies with panic or moral decline. Even the 19th-century Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner presciently wrote about a web that humans would create in order to foster a community that would ultimately come to choke and asphyxiate us more like a spider’s web than a life support.

‘Fukushima sets the faithful into spin mode’ (The Australian, April 2011)

EVEN as the steam was still rising from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan last month, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was busy personally signing a $US9 billion ($8.5bn) deal with Belarus for a new nuclear-powered reactor.

‘Call me a wowser, but this technology is oh-so-creepy’ (The Age, July 2010)

What is diminished when we filter our personalities through the interweb is the essential stuff of humanness – a person’s capacity for empathy, their uniqueness and idiosyncrasies, the quirky way they respond to a social environment.

‘A tea party without the tea’ (ABC Drum, November 2010)

When I toured around the US in 2008 I felt utterly swept up in the optimism of Obama’s election victory. In the Mission District of San Francisco on the night of the victory I will never forget the site of crowds of people of all colours and ages dancing in the streets with firecrackers going off everywhere and raw joyful emotion all over peoples faces.

‘Germany’s Nuclear winter of discontent’ (Business Age, September 2010)

IN AUSTRALIA we often view Germany as at the forefront of the global green energy revolution. So the news that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat coalition will move a new accord to extend the life-span of Germany’s 17 existing nuclear power plants by 12 years has been reverberating here.

‘Gay rights need to be universal’ (The Age, June 2010)

The two young men from Malawi sentenced to jail for the “crime” of loving each other were pardoned at the weekend after intense international pressure and a personal plea from UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon.

‘Convent needs lentil like anything’ (The Age, April 2010)

A QUEUE of hungry patrons stretches from the vegetarian food buffet right out into the front garden where African musicians play drums and chant reggae songs. The smell of curry mixed with sweet chai (tea) fills the air and an old Charlie Chaplin movie is projected above a packed room of people eating at communal tables.

‘Rich are to blame for global warming’ (The Age, November 2009)

If one were to try to come up with a symbol that best captured the excesses of the rich and idle at a time of runaway climate change, it would be hard to find a better example than the fireballs that are spewed out of the Crown Casino towers on the hour every night.

‘Stars align in quest to rid the world of Nukes’ (September 2009)

When Barack Obama takes the unprecedented step of chairing the UN Security Council in New York tonight, he will be setting in motion a personal vision to rid the world of nuclear weapons. If this vision were to be fulfilled, or even set on a path towards fulfilment, it would come to be regarded as one of the defining achievements of his presidency. But that remains a very big if.

‘First wave of ‘climate refugees on the seas’ (The Age, April 2009)

FOR the people of the Maldives, the prediction from the Copenhagen International Climate Congress last month of a sea level rise of one to two metres by 2100 carried extra sting. Sitting just 1.5metres above the sea, the Maldives future existence is at stake.

‘Australia must end its coal addiction’ (Business Age, September 2007)

TODAY climate change has become an issue that even the most conservative political parties in the world — including the American Republicans, the British Tories and the Australian Liberal Party — concede is a major priority for all serious politicians.

‘Gay conservatives and other queer couplings’ (The Age, March 2006)

AS CONSERVATIVE governments in Australia and the US continue to take a strong stance against gay marriage and civil unions between same-sex couples, a prickly question is raised: is there an inherent oxymoron in being gay and conservative?

Howard’s young people are shallow and disengaged (The Age, Feb 2006)

There is a new generation of young Australians who have grown up knowing no other political reality in their voting lives beyond that of the present Liberal Party. For those people, the consequences of living for 10 years in the shadow of John Howard are profound and alarming.

‘A transient art substantiated’ (The Age, February 2006)

THROUGHOUT THE LAST decade stencil graffiti has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis, straddling a tenuous edge between illegal graffiti and coveted commercial art.

‘The Future of Reading’ (The Age, January 2006)

IF BILL GATES HAS HIS WAY, those of us who love the tactile pleasures of reading should proceed into 2006 with a degree of caution. The way we read books, and the way they are distributed globally, is about to undergo radical transformation similar to changes in the way we acquire, distribute and consume music. Books are going digital.

‘A battle of pawn against brawn’ (The Age, December 2005)

“FIGHTING IS DONE in the ring and wars are waged on the board,” claim the creators of the Berlin-based World Chess Boxing Association. Berlin is a city often associated with extremes, and chess boxing, the latest hybrid sport to emerge from the German capital and now sweeping Europe, certainly fits the bill.

‘Melbourne turns its face to the sea’ (The Age, January 2005)

Melbourne’s only beachfront apartments! The ostentatious developers sign outside the new Beacon Cove real estate enclave in Port Melbourne is certainly attention-grabbing. They are also part of a bigger trend. Melbourne’s recent urban beachfront development sheds light on an aspect of our city that is only recently showing signs of change.

‘Top cities don’t pretend everything is perfect‘ (The Age, December 2004)

What a cruel and heartless trick Herald Sun reporter Liam Houlihan played on Melbourne this week. Just as we are gearing up for Christmas, Houlihan saw fit to undermine the very spirit of giving in his special report, “Beggars in our city”. The young journalist dressed as a beggar and hit Melbourne’s footpaths. He dug out his ripped jeans, made signs claiming he needed to get Christmas presents for his kids, “Will work for money” and the like – and sucked the city’s milk of human kindness.

“Dissent to Disco – Michael Franti” (The Age, May 2003)

Michael Franti sits barefoot in the glorious Melbourne autumn sun by the sea at St Kilda beach. Thick lined tribal tattoos are visible on his arms and calf muscles, bulging out of loose-fitting Tibetan-style pants and singlet. Beside him sits his wife, Tara, and beside her the “extended family” of Spearhead band members, all chowing down on a vegetarian feast of noodles and mixed vegetables. One stray dreadlock has dislodged itself from under Franti’s Rasta coloured beanie and it hangs free over his left eye.

‘Ten days that shook the literary world’ (Sydney Morning Herald, March 2003)

It’s a clash of wills that has swelled and spread, pitting the arts community against environment and state politics, and putting Tasmania at the centre of an international cause celebre as the island gears up for its third annual Ten Days on the Island festival.

Graffiti goes upmarket (The Age, February 2003)

A Melbourne stencil artist who calls himself dlux, wearing a hooded windcheater, tracksuit pants and formidable no-brand runners, leads the way to a warehouse in North Melbourne. A few empty cans of scotch and Coke lie among the clutter of cardboard and plastic cutout stencils. There are bubble-wrapped canvasses against a wall and a shabby ping-pong table in the foyer. 

Final dream of a bohemian high priestess (The Age, January 2003)

Even from her hospital bed, artist Vali Myers, 72, and recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, dreams of the future. Myers is Australia’s bohemian high priestess. Born in Sydney, she moved to Box Hill with her family when she was 11. At 19, she moved to Paris, where she spent time as a Left Bank dancer and a vagabond.