The gothic valorisation of colonial legacy is complete, the purification ritual completed, and moral responsibility abrogated. What does this mean for the bracketed social comment? That social conventions are to be maintained, and that to question the white American post-Puritan legacy is tantamount to treason.

The Adelaide Festival’s decision to dump Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah from its upcoming Writers’ Week gives us a grim foretaste of the Australian cultural landscape in 2026.

I never thought they would actually take us away. Rip us from our beds in the dark of the night. Jolted out of sleep like a fish pulled out of water. It sounded like one of those pranks your boarding school buddies would play when one of you got a girlfriend. All the adverts were nothing but sloppy, AI-generated environmental propaganda. I kept telling myself, “There’s no such thing as Climate Police”. They simply do not exist.

If we’re to emerge from this awful spiral, in which one form of identitarian chauvinism spurs the next, we’ll only do so on the basis of a very different politics: one that takes for granted the ability of ordinary people — of any race, gender or creed — to unite against racism and violence. That’s why the Palestine solidarity movement matters more than ever.

Despite this dominant narrative, within the movement there is a clear assuredness that tackling antisemitism is a shared responsibility that is interconnected with the political project of anticolonial liberation, a task that is integrated within the culture of resistance, not separate or outside of the work to free Palestine. Addressing antisemitism is a core business of the solidarity movement.

Imagine though the possibility of a response which was not horrid. Which did not demand more violence be piled up. Which led us to other ways of being together, other horizons of possible futures. Imagine a way of interacting which flowed from our shared vulnerability and shared strength and shared need to be protected by each other. Maybe we need to learn how to brace ourselves for that, my loves.

Rather than writing revisionist histories of the Cronulla Riots, we need to contend with the racism and xenophobia the riots were founded upon. The mob ultimately achieved its aim, with Middle Eastern and Muslim communities avoiding Cronulla. Meanwhile, police work re-constituted the notion that these communities are inherently violent and “terrorising”, corralling them into western Sydney.

An article about my ASIO file from the years 1982 to 1991 that I published in Overland in 2018 raised more general questions about ASIO’s surveillance efforts against the far-left. One reader asked me, “Did you ever work out who the informants were?” I can honestly say “No”, despite having access to the opened files at the National Archives Australia of Alec, David, Marcus, Martin, Rick, Theresa as well as my own.

What binds these actors is not simply distaste for pornography, but a conviction that sexuality and identity require moral regulation. Through advisory roles and institutional influence, they're shaping a digital environment where sexual expression is suspect and censorship is framed as moral duty.

Academics for Palestine WA, in partnership with Academics for Palestine SA, launched a quantitative and qualitative survey to measure the frequency and perception of silencing amongst a cohort vocal on Palestine. The results are now out in a new report: A Climate of Fear: An Empirical Report on the Suppression of Speech on Palestine in Australia.

My mother was killed on 5 December 2023 in Khan Younis. An airstrike hit our home around 3 pm. The building collapsed. I learned she was dead while I was in Taiwan, working on research about how political systems function. The irony is so complete it circles back with precision: I was analysing systems of state power at the exact moment one of those systems was destroying my family.

The key tools of urban planning, like master planning, zoning and state acquisition of land, are derivatives of the state’s perceived need for centralised control. Urban planning assumes there is a blank slate ready to imprint the planner’s vision.

We are writing to request your urgent attention and advocacy for our Palestinian colleagues and the innocent men, women, and children of Palestine who are facing unimaginable suffering and risk of injury, illness, and death due to the genocidal actions of the Israeli government.