Edition 3
Webs of Power
- Published 2nd March, 2004
- ISBN: 9780733313868
- Extent: 268 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
From the revolving door of politics to the junior cricket team, from nepotism in business to the experience of new migrants, networks of people with shared beliefs and expectations shape outcomes more than ever.
Six degrees of separation have been shrunk to two or three as the connected world takes shape.
Webs of Power investigates whether Australia has really become a more connected society and the risks and opportunities this presents
Writers include: Mungo MacCallum, Gideon Haigh, Anne Coombs, Tom Morton, Quentin Dempster, Gerard Henderson, Natasha Mitchell, Jock Given, Sandman, Julian Thomas, Debbie Kilroy, Lee Kofman, Paul Wilson, Chris Chesher, Charles Firth and more.
In this Edition
Art works
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures. Georges Braque, French Painter IT STARTED WITH a life-and-death conversation. The doctor, faced with what was surely a terminal illness that offered at best a scant few more years of life, had another of the many intense discussions he’d...
Limits to power
THE CATHOLIC CATECHISM of old commenced with the question "Who made the world?" The answer was unambiguous: "God made the world."If the Australian Financial Review Magazine's annual "Power" survey took the pedagogical form of a catechism it would begin with the following question: "Who...
Challenge and promise of e-democracy
IN MAY 2001, Mark Latham, then a Labor backbencher in the Commonwealth House of Representatives, set up a website for his Werriwa constituents that he said was the first example of internet-based direct democracy. Latham argued that Australian politics was so dominated by secretive,...
Welcome back Bakunin – Life chances in Australia: some notes of discomfort
The first topic for consideration today is this: will it be feasible for the working masses to know complete emancipation as long as the education available to those masses continues to be inferior to that bestowed upon the bourgeois, or, in more general terms,...
Virtual strangers, imaginary friends
TODAY I BOUGHT a new mobile telephone. The woman who served me seemed weary, which was understandable since it was after 4pm in a very busy shopping centre. Not one to suffer meaningless chatter with salespeople, I went straight to the point and asked...
The trials of apprenticeship: the limits of vicarious power
THE CASUAL OBSERVER might imagine that a sweeping election victory after years in the political wilderness would be cause for celebration – vindication for the effort, the campaign strategy and the political tactics used to achieve the result; the opportunity to give effect to...
Mobilising rural Australia
October 2003Betty Dixon from Goulburn called this morning. She had some information about one of "her boys" in the Baxter detention centre, Ebrahim Sammaki, whose wife, Endong was killed in the Bali bombing. Ebrahim is to be allowed to go to Adelaide for a...
Watching me watching them watching you
I SPENT THE first of my teenage years living in the grounds of an approved school, a place that faced onto a ruined castle said to have given a night's shelter to Mary Queen of Scots. The fleeing queen was never there at all...
Unravelling Filipino terrorism
MANILA WAS IN pitch darkness and gangs of soldiers roamed the streets arresting anyone who was foolish enough to be out without a good excuse. A gun was thrust into the airport taxi I was travelling in but was quickly withdrawn when my driver...
Power with sisters inside
ON JANUARY 7, 1990, Australia's only murder inside a women's prison occurred at Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre at Boggo Road. The old jail, overcrowded and dilapidated, had been simmering with barely contained tension for some time. Many of the 106 women were locked together;...
Discovering the mother tongue
PHILOSOPHERS SAY INNER contradictions are a natural thing; they lie within the core of the human condition. I'd add that from the imbroglio of everyday paradoxes, there will always emerge one overriding paradox – one that defines the course of our lives without us...
In the corridor of uncertainty
IN OCTOBER, ALONG with the arrival of the first Christmas beetle and the distorted tunes of far-off Mr Whippy vans, I hear the unmistakable sounds of breaking voices uniting in messy appeals and anxious relatives yelling out, "Hit it, Simon, you idiot", which signals...
Media rules in the court of Carr
IT WAS A typical political fix. More designed to fit ministers' personalities, their power preferences and media agendas than coherence in governance, policy formulation or operational management.The re-election of the Carr Government for a third four-year term in New South Wales on March 22,...
Fragile spoils of victory
AUSTRALIA HAS ALWAYS prided itself on its political stability, but after World War II the country quickly settled into an equilibrium that sometimes seemed dangerously close to rigidity.The Labor states of New South Wales and Tasmania stuck with Labor and the Liberal states of...
One is the loneliest number, the extended brain
One is the loneliest numberThat you'll ever doTwo can be as bad as oneIt's the loneliest number since the number one– Harry Nilsson DON'T KID YOURSELF. Your mind and its contents, memories and neuroses, creative impulses and curiosities, are not your own. From birth, there's...
Uncle Sam’s bastard children
The world is not for sale.– attac website, 2003Free trade is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is free trade.– Sir John Bowring, 19th-century British industrialist, social reformer and free-trader ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2003, 56-year-old Lee Kyung-Hae, a farmer from Korea, clambered onto the fence surrounding the...
Featured Contributors
Debbie Kilroy
Debbie Kilroy was imprisoned for drug trafficking in 1989 for 6 years. She was stabbed and witnessed the only...
Mungo MacCallum (December 1941–December 2020)
Mungo MacCallum was one of Australia's longest-serving political commentators. He wrote for Nation Review, the National Times, The Australian, The Sydney...
Andrew O’Hagan
The ebullient Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan is best known for his fiction. He has written three novels: Our Fathers, Personality and Be...
Anne Tiernan
Dr Anne Tiernan is a leading Australian scholar in public policy. Her career spans higher education, federal and state...
