Politics

2014 has been something of a watershed year for books on Australian politics. Of course, this is hardly surprising. The soap opera of the Gillard and Rudd years will probably exercise politicians, analysts and biographers for years to come. But we are currently facing something of an armada – to steal a phrase from the popular media – of political memoirs and biographies.

This year’s Biennale is all very anodyne and, ironically enough, apolitical. It is rather over representative of Scandinavia and the Anglosphere for some reason, and there does not appear to have been much of an effort to put the Australian artists in any sort of international context.

It cannot escape notice that, by King’s telling, things really start to go screwy when a much wider range of people get access not merely to politics, but to the political self-expression that was hitherto the preserve of the author… his sometimes acute analysis of particular deployments of notions of offence treats them as akin to an act of state censorship, a charge the Right relies on almost obsessively.

Electorates are not enamoured of the idea that the nation state now has such limited power over its destiny. Democracies dependent on foreign creditors; massive multinational companies subject to few democratic controls; an international financial market with the power to decide the strength of currencies – these things sit uneasily with the idea that a nation should be able to determine its own fate and the fate of its people.

How is it possible in the network society of the twenty-first century that the Australian public should have been so ill informed for so long about what its troops have been doing in Afghanistan, and why has this situation been allowed to persist?

Australia’s first female Prime Minister is the figure at the centre of this pile of books, and they were all produced during the last few months of her Prime Ministership. They came out in quick succession… all of them had gone to press before the afternoon of June 26 when Prime Minister Julia Gillard called the leadership spill that saw the federal ALP caucus vote her out of office in favour of Kevin Rudd.

The Chinese Communist Party is arguably the single most powerful organisation in the world.