Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

"After three lovely months of traveling through Australia and meeting people, one Wednesday afternoon during the second week of September I was called by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, or ASIO, and asked to come in for an interview. I asked if I was required to do so and the woman at the other end of the phone said "No, you are not obliged too." I then asked if this would affect the remaining two weeks of my time in Australia and she said she couldn't say. I should have listened with closer attention to that non-answer." Scott Parkin

"As McKnight points out, there is now no socialist movement to offer an alternative pole of attraction. The 150 year old socialist tradition has largely gone, unremarked and unmourned. The New Left, which rose in the 1960s and matured in the 1970s, has also joined socialism, at least as the world knew it, in the dustbin of history. “It’s now clear,” he says, ” that the socialist component of the New Left was the last gasp of an older Left, not the promise of a renewed one.” In its place, he sees the modern ‘broad’ Left (which to him includes members and supporters of the ALP, Democrats and Greens across to some current supporters of the Liberal and National parties.) But as far as he is concerned, all those people are standing on an eroding philosophical sandbank." Ian MacDougall