Duly noted
Some things I have been watching, reading, listening to, thinking about, or longing for
Towards the end of last year, Peter Lewis, the Principal of the political research organisation, Essential Media, convened a meeting to discuss ways in which we might fix our broken systems of public communication.
I was one of those attending and it was an interesting, if inconclusive evening. (Hey, these things take time.) I had previously published an interesting position paper Peter had written that outlined many of the matters we discussed that night (highly recommended). I’m now happy to inform you of the latest iteration of this unfolding process.
Peter will be speaking at a lunchtime event on 17 July run by the Per Capita thinktank, and booking details are available here. If I didn’t have my own speaking commitment in Sydney the same day (more on that below), I would be there with bells on. I hope some of you can get along. It will not just be a talk, but a demonstration of the approach to public engagement Peter and his team are trying to encourage:
The founder of Per Capita’s Centre of the Public Square initiative, Peter Lewis, will launch his “Civility Manifesto’, a framework for addressing the division at the heart of our broken politics.
The Civility Manifesto outlines how media, politics and the digital platforms have conspired to build a public discourse driven by conflict and anger, where truth and context are sidelined.
Peter will outline the work of the new Centre, including advocating to constrain the power of Big Tech, campaigning for privacy reform and investing in alternate models of civic engagement based on identifying points of connection and giving citizens real power.
Drawing on his work with the progressive research and strategy firm, Essential, Peter will share experience with Yes 23, the disability sector, renewable energy and the introduction of AI, to show how the tools to build a more collaborative politics already exist.
This will be an engaging and interactive event, where participants will be given the tools to guide the discussion and provide real-time feedback.
BONUS: Two free tickets are available to readers of this newsletter if you use the code FUTURE-OF-EVERYTHING-FREEBIE when you book. (Note: Only 1 per order. Can be used on the in-person lunch or the live stream.)
If you do get along or join the livestream—book here and use the code—I would be really keen to hear your feedback.
Here’s another example of people working on better ways of engaging local communities.
The speaking gig I mentioned above is that I will be the keynote at the launch of a new, permanent, citizens assembly/community panel set up specifically to address issues to do with health in Western Sydney. The project is being run by WentWest, a Primary Health Network organisation based in that part of Sydney and they have already run three events. These went so well that the organisation has agreed to fund an ongoing body that allows local people to have say in matters that affect their community. It’s kind of incredible that they have got this going, and it is precisely the sort of public engagement that I champion on these pages, not to mention in books, articles and the odd thesis I’ve written over the last thirty-or-so years. The powerhouse behind the project is Dr Coralie Wales and I am very happy to accept her invitation to speak at the launch on July 17.
Will we have an early election?
I note Peter Dutton has informed his party that they should be ready for one. I also note that community independent for Kooyong, Monique Ryan, is calling on the government to go early. She released an open letter to the PM saying, “I don't make this request lightly. Governments should, where possible, complete their full terms. I do not believe early elections should occur unless there are exceptional circumstances; however, these are exceptional circumstances, given the destabilising effect of the opposition's policy announcements on our economy."
I doubt it will happen, but the reason I mention it is because of something that I think has passed a lot of people by.
You no doubt know that the AEC review committee has made a bunch of recommendations for redrawing electoral boundaries, and these will be finalised towards the end of the year.1 If, however, an election was called before these new arrangements were put in place, the AEC would be forced to do a mini-redistribution, something they have never done before. According to Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers, this would likely involve two particular changes: the merging of Higgins and Chisolm in Victoria and—get this—the merging of Wentworth and Warringah in NSW. The latter change in particular would be huge! It means merging two teal seats into one and raises all sorts of questions about what would happen to Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall, the current independent incumbents in each of those electorates.
You can watch Rogers’ comments in the video below. The mini-redistribution comes up at about the 22-minute mark in this interview with David Speers.
Did anyone else watch Shōgun on Disney+?
We loved it and pretty much binged it over a quiet weekend a few months back.
A decade ago, when Noah was studying Japanese at school, he had a tutor who used to come to our place and put him through his paces. She was a native Japanese speaker but grew up in Australia so also spoke native-level English. She was also fluent in Spanish and Korean (if I remember correctly). Anyway, apart from being a language genius, she was just so lovely and we all got on well. One day she invited Tanya, Noah and me to lunch at a Japanese restaurant not far from where we live in South Melbourne. She said it was the most authentic Japanese restaurant in the city, and I have to say, the meal was fantastic.
During lunch, I asked what she meant by “most authentic” expecting some information on the nature of the food or the service. Instead, she pointed at a framed print on a wall and said, “well, it’s things like how that print is hung.”
I never got to follow up on what she actually meant by that, but it had always stuck in my head, and it was the first thing I thought of when I read this piece about Disney’s production of Shōgun. It’s an interesting article about what makes the show so, well, authentic, and it really added to my enjoyment of what I already thought was a fantastic production.
Speaking of such things, just by-the-by, once, when I was doing some talks in Seoul, back before Covid, the young woman assigned to look after me by the City of Seoul, the organisation that had invited me to speak, asked if I would like to do anything in particular for lunch. I asked her to take me somewhere authentic, that word again, the sort of place the local workers, rather than the tourists, go. She led me through some streets on the other side of the main road that runs past Gyeongbokgung Palace and sat me down in a very ordinary looking place that soon filled up with local office workers. She ordered a meal for us and it consisted of pieces of meat and vegetables that you cooked yourself in a large pot of steaming broth. I didn’t love it, especially compared to some of the fantastic meals I’d been lucky enough to have that week, but I felt she had fulfilled the brief I’d given her.
Still, I noticed she hadn’t eaten much and I asked her why.
“Too authentic for me,” she said, “and I’m still full from the leftover pizza I had for breakfast.”
The Palestinian Artists Consortium is a…
…“group of Palestinian artists who seek to empower themselves by sharing their artwork together in one virtual venue and to reach a wider community of Palestinian art lovers.”
I stumbled across this site the other day and thought some of their stuff was fantastic, and really reasonably priced. This one, for instance, appealed. It’s called The Refugee Camp. Read about it at the link. If anyone buys anything, let me know.
“This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.”
According to the Intro to Hitler:Volume 1:Ascent 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich, there have only been four “serious biographies” of Hitler since the war. I’m not sure how much work the word “serious” is doing in that claim, but this is an incredible book. All 1500 pages of it (and that’s just Volume 1).
Having just finished it—along with about 50 other books on the general topic over the course of this year—it is the first time I have really felt I have a sense of how the Holocaust was made possible; how we went from a generations-old antisemitism to the industrial-scale attempt to massacre an entire race of people. I now have a clear idea of the forces, personal and social, that allowed that transformation to happen, and I am in no doubt that anyone dismissing Trump and co. as unserious or not as big a problem as they seem, that we are somehow exaggerating the threat they pose, is being unforgivably naive. This isn’t to say that Trump=Hitler, but it is to say that the forces that drive such political movements still exist, that there are resonances that sound across the generations, however much particular circumstances change, and that I would much rather overreact to the current threat than fall into any sort of sensible centrist complacency that pats us on the head and tells us that such comparisons are beyond the pale.
The book sets out the little that is known of Hitler’s childhood, and then gives a detailed account of when he moves to Vienna in 1908 (aged 19), and then to Munich in 1913. There is an account of the War years, and from then on, an almost month-by-month account of when leaves the Army, moves back to Munich, and begins his political career. The narrative stays at that level of detail right through to 1939 and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. You get the broad scope of historical detail, but the focus is always on Hitler-the-person, with many personal accounts from friends, acquaintances, colleagues and enemies, trying to piece together who he was. By the time we get to his assumption of the leadership of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), the Nazi Party, a lot of the personal detail comes from Goebbel’s diaries, though the Propaganda Minister’s views are never taken at face value.
As ever, for me anyway, the question that drives such immersion in Hitler’s story is how his visceral hatred of Jews—hardly an unusual position amongst Europeans at that time—intensified to the extent that it did, to the point that he decided the only way of dealing with “the problem” was mass extermination. How does anyone make that leap? The book doesn’t directly address that question—it could almost be said to ignore it—and I think in many ways the question is unanswerable. The times suited Hitler, but Hitler also suited the times, and it is in the spark between the two, between that particular man and that particular moment that gave us that particular outcome.
And yet, here we are.
The book is incredible, definitely worth your time, if for no other reason than what it tells us about our own time. As Jake Romm notes in this review of another account of the Holocaust, “‘Never Again’ rings hollow when the conditions it refers to are regarded as historically unique.”
See the article I published this week by Bronwen Bock and Lucy Bradlow, independent job-sharing candidates for Higgins.
That Pizza comment gave me a chuckle!
Will check out the Hitler biography. Sounds interesting.
If you are interested, I recommend the Stalin biography by Stephen Kotkin. It is 3 volumes, with volume 3 still to be published. Volume 1 and 2 are very detailed (although he does go a bit off track at times, but it is all background I suppose!).
Stalin, Vol. I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
Stalin, Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941
To be honest, I am not sure how he is going to fit from the start of Russia's involvement in WW2 to Stalin's death in one volume.
Japanese period dramas (especially the Sunday night year-long drama series) are renowned for absolute attention to authenticity of the particular era - and generally following each episode noted historians explain the features of historic record and cultural asides which featured. That Disney would be so attentive to this James Clavell novel recreation for the television series is highly commendable. I remember the first series with some affection - so long ago and with a main character played by Richard Chamberlain whose Japanese language knowledge never ever advanced beyond the same half-a-dozen phrases. I spent over 16 years in Japan and though I would not presume to claim fluency - I did reach the stage of giving speeches/addresses in Japanese of lengths varying from 10 minutes to a half-hour or at times to an hour. As for your time in Seoul. Next time ask to be taken to Poom. My wife and I lived a half-year in München in 1977. In Rindermarkt just a few paces off Marienplatz. Lots of good memories. We went back in 2019 - stayed in a friend's apartment in Bogenhausen - five minutes stroll to the house of Thomas Mann in one direction - in the other arriving at the Chinesische Turm in the Englischer Garten. We took a street tour from Marienplatz with a chap married to a local - he was from Aotearoa/NZ. Brilliant. And so much had changed in those 42 years - with markers to find sites associated with the Hitler presence here in the 1920s - where Hermann GÖRING basically saved Hitler from gunfire when their attempted putsch was thwarted. And then in Berlin - a brilliant Jewish sites tour led by a young fellow from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil - his PhD on Hannah Arendt - guided us to all manner of places both sides of the former Berlin Wall - including to Museum Blindenwerkstatt - Otto Weidt - his Workshop for Blind Jewish brush makers - a variant of "Oskar Schindler" protection - of his workers - from the Gestapo. Such things I remember. Thanks for your posts, Tim.