The Age, 29 December 2014 

The article focuses our attention on the democratic deficit that has beocme commonplace in many parts of the Western world.

Published in The Conversation

There has never been a time when the disconnect between political elites and the public interest was greater than it is today.

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The major parties seem uninterested or unable to respond to a drastically transformed political agenda. And so the disconnect grows wider by the day – and the contradictions ever sharper.

On 7 July 2017, more than 120 countries adopted a treaty at a UN conference that prohibits the production, stockpiling, use or threatened use of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. Australia was a notable absentee. So were the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons.

The result of the recent snap election called by Shinzo Abe and Japan’s steady military build-up are a portent of things to come. The Korean crisis, which owes at least as much to Washington’s flexing of military muscle as to Pyongyang’s misguided nuclear antics, holds the key to many of these ominous developments.