Scott Ludlam

Orizuru: Peace Ambassadors and Spinifex Hills

The sky is white today. The sea has turned slate grey, and the deep swells rocking the Mona Lisa slowly from side to side are ripped with white foam. We have been out of sight of land for only two days since leaving behind the lonely outflung arms of…

i. checkmate

There is an old story about the original creator of the game of chess, a wily mathematician who submits his invention to the ruler of the country. Asked by the delighted queen what he would require by way of reward, the mathematician requests to be paid in gold. He proposes the queen place one single…

Building the resilient city

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet”
William Gibson.

Take a drive an hour south through the rapidly expanding growth corridor fusing Perth to Mandurah, and you’ll fly past a road sign at once hopeful and…

The hitchhikers guide to net filtering

“Does it worry you that you don’t talk any kind of sense?”
~ Agda, the Restaurant at the end of the Universe

Every couple of months we get the opportunity to hold a discussion directly, on the record, with…

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”

These are turbulent times. The catastrophic bushfires may have wiped it off the front page, but last week saw the passage through federal parliament of the Government’s $42 billion ‘economic stimulus package’.
This is a fraught attempt to cushion the economy…

dear jo

this december, we celebrate a very important 30th anniversary: it is 30 years since jo vallentine was elected to the senate.

On October 19 I was invited to participate in a ‘Men of Letters’event in Sydney — an occasional departure for the wonderful women of letters team. ten of us were…

on an agreement

The 2010 election delivered up a ‘plague on both your houses’ outcome that is still kicking out the occasional aftershock. To a visitor from Europe there would be nothing particularly remarkable about the idea of a multi-hued Parliament in which political parties and independents are forced to sit…

inaugural speech

I would like to begin by acknowledging that we meet on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal people, and by paying my respects to the custodians of culture and country. After ‘Sorry’ comes the other S word; Sovereignty over this island continent that was never ceded by the Traditional Owners. The…

42 Dangerous Days ~ Green perspectives on a multicultural Australia

All year, the Prime Minister has been waiting for another Tampa to sail over the horizon and provide the Government with a trigger for the same ruthlessly effective campaign themes we saw in 2001.
Play with race…