Category Archives: Quotidian

By Andrew L. Urban. On Thursday, June 30, 2016, two days before the 2016 Federal Election, Sky News Channel’s Political Editor, David Speers, hosted what was called a Focus Group discussion with 12 uncommitted voters at the suburban Rooty Hill … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban. Democracy? Demonocracy is what we are heading for, here in Australia, as the July 2, 2016 Federal Election campaign begins its final 4-week marathon. Both three sides of politics – the Liberal/National coalition, Labour and the … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban “Love her or hate her, to disrespect the PM is to disrespect our entire system,” writes Jacqueline Maley (Why it takes a flying crust to burst the political bubble, Sydney Morning Herald, June 1, 2013). Maley … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban Same sex ‘marriage’ is a hot issue around the Western world, with uncivil arguments and nasty remarks keeping it hot – but not too enlightened. By contrast, writing in the Weekend Australian (May 25/26, 2013) Peter … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban May 14, 2013: We have to praise President Barack Obama’s response to alleged wrongdoing at the IRS. “If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban It’s encouraging to see that people do participate in democracy when given a chance. And just as gradual, almost invisible erosion of democratic principles is as dangerous as large scale trampling of those principles, so is … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban All democracies are equal – but some democracies are more equal than others, if you’ll pardon the Orwellian correlation. All democratic governments make mistakes and some make terrible mistakes. Some are gold plated, a few are … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban Democracy is a complex system of governing, unavoidably full of compromises and contradictions. Amongst other things it guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of the press. One can feed into the other. The media can report … Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban The uncomfortable truth is that Al Gore got it wrong. His urgent call for action on global warming (now it’s called climate change) was turbo-charged with the political slogan that tackling it was the greatest moral … Continue reading →

In George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘newspeak’ was one of the key tools of the totalitarian State, used to diminish the range of words, hence thoughts, by the citizens. A propagandist language, it is characterised by euphemism, circumlocution and … Continue reading →