The record size of the crossbench in today’s Australian Senate is no accident. It is not a phenomena limited to Australia - democracies in Europe, South America and Asia are increasingly home to a raft of smaller parties exercising political clout. Though ruling governments — Labor or Liberal, Left or Right — rail against the shift, voters are increasingly weary of the ‘two party’ binary, and the ‘politics as usual’ it represents.
Read MoreThe Cold War was brought to an end, not with a hail of gunfire, but the roar of the masses seizing their own future. Mao insisted that “a revolution is not a dinner party”; but what could have been a more revolutionary act than East and West Berliners sharing champagne over the ruins of the wall, or picnickers carousing on the open Austrian-Hungarian border?
Read MoreA King rides through the Savannah, guided by a retinue of men, and lays waste to the great beasts before him. Some flee from the onslaught. Others attempt, in vain, to defend themselves. They are all victims. They are shot and stabbed. They roar and thrash and bleed out. The earth groans beneath the bounty of blood. Today, that image will earn you an earful from environmentalists and activists around the globe. But millenia ago in Ancient Mesopotamia, it was practically a qualification.
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