Already one of the all-time great Labor speeches; a reminder of Labor values made in despairing circumstances as, tragically, so many other great Labor speeches have been.
(Source: anthonyalbanese.com.au)
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An audience, an audience, my kingdom for an audience
“The Canberra press gallery has reported for decades - at a comfortable distance - on industries under which various evolutionary banana skins have been slipped.
We covered the Australian automotive industry as it grappled with global trade liberalisation, and the consequent removal of its protections in the form of tariffs.
We have engaged in dispassionate conjecture about the sorts of retraining forestry workers could undertake (whittling clothes pegs out of naturally-fallen sassafras? Artisan cheese-making?) as wholesale logging staged its slow-motion collapse in the face of the sustainability argument.
And now, it’s happening to us. It turns out we’ve been operating in a protectionist paradise too - we just never thought about it that way.
Just think of the monopolistic advantages we enjoyed. The possession of the means to convey information to a large audience - be it vast clanking printing presses or the bristling array of dishes, cables, satellites, OB vans and countless other machines that go “Bing” on which television networks rely to make broadcasting look so deceptively easy - generated all sorts of market advantages. They cost a bomb, but it was worth it. Technology and infrastructure were our tariff walls.”
- Annabel Crabb, in a piece written after her Eisenhower Fellowship in the US.
The best NBA draft class of all time? I'm gonna go with 1984.
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“We’re not used to thinking of Maugham as a hippie, but it’s worth recalling that he was roughing it around India for three months when he was 63, seeking out swamis and yogis; he told his friend Christopher Isherwood, a few years later, that his great wish, when he turned 70, was to return to the subcontinent and study Shankara. He had no time for the likes of Henry James, with his country-house themes, and from early on was sounding much more like a vagabond Thoreau (“What is the use of hurrying to pile up money when one can live on so little?”). Read his great apologia, “The Summing Up,” and you find him as metaphysically alive and excited as that German who just spun out his creed to you over dinner in a candlelit restaurant in Ladakh last night. Indeed, Maugham read philosophy every morning when he woke up, the way others might do yoga.”
Full article here with thanks to @the99percent, @dailydoseofjess
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