There is a growing canyon now separating politics as understood and practiced by political authorities from the political practices of everyday people.
Australia’s traditional reliance on multilateralism and alliances won’t be enough to negotiate the geopolitical rivalries of the Asian century.
EPA/Barbara Walton
For the past two centuries, Australia got many of the big calls on global engagement right. In our third century, there are worrying signs that we have not fully grasped what the rise of Asia means.
Online petitions almost certainly do not hold the same weight with their targets as offline petitions do.
shutterstock
Online petitions send a certain signal to politicians and other leaders: we care, but maybe not enough to get off our seats.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are immortalised as political heroes, but both had personal issues that might have proved politically fatal today.
AAP/Diana Plater
The global food production system is inherently undemocratic. Based on shared experiences of the adverse effects, the world’s citizens need to intervene as democratic publics to transform a broken system.
Surveying the current world order, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is essentially ungovernable. Chaos, conflict and crises seem to be the order of the day. The phrase “international order” seems…
This Occupy Toronto sign sums up the sentiment, but people are also moving on from capitalism in practice by such means as digitally enabled collaboration and the sharing economy.
flickr/Eric Parker
While some find it hard to imagine life after capitalism, the digitally connected people of the world have begun embracing a new set of ethical concerns requiring new types of economies.
‘Goddesses of Democracy’ in the 21st century: Thomas Marsh sculpted a replica (left) in Washington DC of the statue destroyed in Tiananmen Square in 1989; on the 21st anniversary of the massacre, Hong Kong students erected a statue on campus (centre) after police had seized a plastic replica.
Flickr/DB King; Flickr/Ryanne Lai; Flickr/Ryanne Lai
The out-of-the-blue move to a living wage in the UK exemplifies the ditching of methodical public policy processes for manipulative hype and spin, the ‘hyper-democracy’ that brings politics into disrepute.
Thomas Piketty’s book provides new tools to consider the property status of animals in contemporary society.
Morgan Lieberman
Should animals be treated like other forms of property such as land, machinery and “stocks”? What role do animals that are owned by humans play in the concept of global wealth?
Libertarians, such as David Leyonhjelm, refuse to see anything but individual liberty as having decisive moral weight.
AAP/Lukas Coch
David Leyonhjelm is a conviction politician whose positions are governed by principle, not populism. But he is exposing the disturbing moral thinness of the libertarian principles he espouses.
Hands up in the 15M movement in Madrid.
Ana Rey/flickr
Candidates from Spain’s ‘15M’ movement – born of mass protests in 2011 – have responded in various ways to the dilemma that being elected creates for those wishing to overturn the ‘old politics’.
The Abbott government has hid asylum policy behind ‘operational matters’ since it took office – starting with then-immigration minister Scott Morrison in 2013.
AAP/Paul Miller
Liberalism is a dirty word for the majority of South Africans. This goes back to early colonialism. Liberals opposed apartheid but not the close relationship between capitalism and apartheid.
Nothing of what William’s subjects had in life escaped the Domesday Book. Today, more covertly, those in power are using mass surveillance to collect all the digital details of our lives.
Flickr/Andrew Barclay
Almost 1000 years after their ruler demanded every detail of serfs’ lives, the digital age and mass surveillance are creating a new and undemocratic imbalance between citizens and those with power over them.
The story of Johnny Depp’s dogs and their potential fate attracted global media attention.
AAP/Dave Hunt
Behind the uproar over Johnny Depp’s dogs lies a serious and evolving idea: our animal companions have an important place in our lives that entitles them to rights akin to a sort of citizenship.
This Conservative Party leaflet kills three birds with one stone and is a classic example of Lynton Crosby’s campaign strategy.
UK Conservative Party/Buzzfeed
The British Conservative government’s re-election is the latest and perhaps most startling electoral triumph for Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. So how did he do it?
‘What’s in it for me?’ is a common question today, but not one that necessarily produces the best answers for collective wellbeing.
Shutterstock/iQoncept
The concept of the greater good has made a comeback in Europe in an era of budget austerity, but in Australia too few of us are alive to its meaning – and to its vulnerability.
Professor of Comparative Political Science and Democracy Research at the Humboldt University Berlin; Associate of the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney; Director of Research Unit Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.