(To the tune of Teddy Bears' Picnic)
If you go up to the Senate today
You’ll surely feel no surprise
If you go up to the Senate today
You’ll scarcely need a disguise
For every tycoon who ever there was
Is rejoicing there for certain becos
Today’s the day they’re getting their tax cut….
A party day for millionaires
They’re having a lovely time today,
It hardly took them unawares
It’s been planned since election day.
Dissent didn’t obey strict decade-demarcation lines on Australian campuses in the radical 1960s, writes Sally Wood in Dissent: The Student Press in 1960s Australia.
Despite his great CV, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin doesn’t quite reach its satirical pretensions.
US rapper Kendrick Lamar has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Music for his critically acclaimed album DAMN. Lamar became the first non-classical or jazz musician to ever win the prize, Democracy Now! noted.
The filmmaker Taika Waititi said racism is very pronounced in New Zealand, explaining he faced blatant discrimination as a Te Whānau-ā-Apanui youth.
In a recent interview, "Thor: Ragnarok" director and sometimes actor says his native New Zealand is “racist as fuck.”
"People just flat-out refuse to pronounce Maori names properly. There’s still profiling when it comes to Polynesians. It’s not even a colour thing – like, ‘Oh, there’s a black person.’ It’s, ‘If you’re Poly then you’re getting profiled.’”
Jepke Goudsmit & Graham Jones, co-directors of Kinetic Energy Theatre Company, reflect on the life and loss of a unique place — The Edge, last known as the King Street Theatre, of which they were the original founders.
Good, affordable theatre venues and practice studios have long been hard to come by in Sydney. The latest victim of our city’s rat race for survival is our former home base: that intimate theatre at the bottom of King Street in Newtown, which we set up in 1985.
Radical US sports writer Dave Zirin asks why a major multinational corporation is sponsoring football (soccer) teams in illegal Israeli settlements.
Greater Sunrise
A play by Zoe Hogan
Directed by Julia Patey
Belvoir Theatre, Sydney
Until April 21
"In 2004, Australia placed a bug in Timor-Leste's presidential cabinet room, in order to gain the advantage in negotiations over resources in the Timor Sea. The bug was placed under the cover of an aid program. The bug ended up costing Timor-Leste billions of dollars in lost resources," playwright Zoe Hogan notes about her new play, Greater Sunrise.
Night Shift: 270 Factory Stories
David Macaray
CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Los Angeles, 2015
360 pages, US$17.99
David Macaray’s enjoyable and readable Night Shift is an exquisite study of industrial work in a US manufacturing site between the mid-1970s and the mid-’90s. Being a marvel of industrial sociology, it avoids managerialism’s dehumanisation of factory workers — e.g. human resources (HR) and of management studies that turn into an academic research object.
