Bartlett's Blog

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about mountaintop mining in the USA. All mining has some impact, but the sheer destructiveness of this type of mining is astonishing - and that's before you take into account the greenhouse impact of the coal. This article in the New York Times details the potential impact of a similar project in West Virginia. The significance of this proposal ...

A conference was held in Brisbane this week on the topic of Ending Homelessness.  I was part of a panel exploring migrants' interaction with homeless services. One of the main speeches was by Nan Roman, who is the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in the USA. I had the chance to interview Nan Roman today on my regular weekly radio shift.  I also spent last weekend ...

There is more evidence that, however unjust and dysfunctional the administration of Australia's immigration laws was in our recent past, it is being outstripped by what has been happening in the USA. There are more and more examples coming to light in the USA that have echoes of the Cornelia Rau and Vivienne Alvarez debacles of the Howard era in Australia.  The reasons these things are happening are similar ...

As the speech itself acknowledges, a single speech can't resolve things.  But it is impossible to overstate how significant it would be if the vision President Obama expresses and aspires to in this speech is successful.  The text of the speech is here, or here for translations into 14 other languages.  It is worth taking the time to listen to and watch as well.

One of the major things to assess after all the voting has been done in the USA will be just how big the impact has been of the Obama campaign’s widespread use of online campaigning techniques.  Even a casual user of the internet on the other side of the planet will have found it hard to avoid some sign of Obama’s presence.  I have been impressed by the ...

It’s no surprise that Barack Obama is receiving the majority of newspaper endorsements in the USA, but I was a bit surprised to see this one from the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska!  But even more interesting was their assessment of their local Governor, Sarah Palin

Supporters of the Obama campaign have set up a website aimed at giving the public a chance to put forward ideas, and comment and rate each other’s ideas.  It’s billed as an “unofficial campaign thinktank”.  Of course, a lot of it is about providing yet another way to draw potential supporters in and build on the already formidable database of contacts and small scale donors supporting Obama - ...

I’ve just realised that a week ago was the fourth anniversary of starting up this blog, which gives me cause to reflect on how tiresome it is to still see the stale, dead-end ‘journalists versus bloggers’ argument being aired far too often. This recent, very over-defensive effort in The Australian is an example - written by Christian Kerr, who developed his career through commentary in the independent media and should ...

Beneath the focus on the Presidential contest in the USA, hundreds of other electoral contests are also taking place for Congressional and state-based seats. Reports about a couple of those contests recently caught my eye. These two links tell of Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim woman of Arab descent who has just won the Democratic primary for a seat in Detroit – in a predominantly Latino district – getting 44 per ...

I know some people complain about how much coverage the election President of the USA is getting in Australia, but it has the potential to have a very significant effect on the future of the entire planet, so I think it’s worth following. Even though Barack Obama now seems to be doing the inevitable tilting to the centre that happens once every primary is concluded, he seems to ...

On June 25, during my final sitting week in Parliament, I’ll be speaking at a Politics & Technology conference organised by Microsoft. You can see all the speakers and panellists at this link. The keynote speaker will be US political writer, Matt Bai. I guess it will sort of mark the point I make a shift from a blogging politician to a person blogging about politics. The roles of ...

Kentucky is fleetingly in the news today because of the US Presidential primaries, but I wish there was more attention being paid to the extraordinarily destructive coal mining that has been going on in that state day after day. There is a lot of debate about how to reduce coal consumption and reduce the greenhouse impacts of coal usage, but whatever options we adopt in regards to that, ...

Friday April 4th marked the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. King’s legacy and impact is greatest by far in the USA, but he has become known around the world as a voice for human rights and non-violence.  This piece by Joseph Palermo at The Huffington Post gives an interesting perspective on that legacy and on King’s final days.  It is interesting to speculate on how ...

The drawn out contest to determine the next President of the USA is an extraordinary process. I find some components highly laudable, and some of them less than ideal. One of the problems with such a very long process is the need for the media (and the general public to some extent) to constantly try to find new angles and stories about the campaign. This could be seen ...

Super Tuesday in the USA is almost upon us, where a major step will be taken in the process of choosing the next President of that nation. The result will affect us all, not least in regards to the successful candidate's foreign/military policy and the approach towards climate change. Opinion polls (which have had a rather sketchy record in this contest) suggest the contest for the Democratic nomination between ...

I imagine most people who are interested in politics and trawl around the internet have seen various quizzes which seek to categorise your political views. These have their limitations of course, but can be fun and occasionally interesting. This one is probably the best known. This one I found (via Crikey) asks you a series of questions in order to ‘determine your position in the political landscape for the USA ...

Some time ago, I wrote a piece about the issue of people living outside their country of citizenship being able to vote, pointing to the example of the system which had just been adopted for the Italian Parliament, which provides specific seats for Italian voters who live in other countries. (As it turned out, those few seats specifically reserved for citizens based outside the country were crucial in the ...

One would normally assume things are more permissive now regarding what is considered obscene than was the case fifty years ago, but there is an example in the USA at the moment to show that is not always the case. Fifty years ago, a landmark court case in the USA found that Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" was not obscene, as it had "redeeming social importance" and literary ...

It seems like both the content and topic of citizenship tests fascinate lots of people. The YouTube video Lyn Allison did on the topic got a lot more views than usual, as well as generating some media coverage. Of course, it's also given the Coalition party yet another reason to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars to run completely unnecessary advertisments to tell people there is now a ...

I was just sent a copy of this article from the Caribbean Net News, which relates to the refugee swap deal announced by Australia and the USA. It is interesting to see how the agreement is being perceived by many in Haiti, one of the source countries cited as being possibly subject to the deal.