John Birmingham joins us at 6.30pm on Friday 20th November to discuss his new Quarterly Essay, On One Nation and The Rising Right.

The rise of One Nation isn’t a sudden eruption. In this intimate, perceptive and funny essay, John Birmingham gives us the deep history and the present moment. Using personal stories, insights from political insiders and overarching analysis, he shows who is thinking about voting One Nation and why. This is an essay about nostalgia, rage and the efforts to build an unstoppable movement to change Australia.

In Another Country, John Birmingham maps One Nation’s Australia and explores where our politics goes from here. 

“When a person who has been told their whole life that they are an autonomous economic actor, responsible for their own success, suddenly discovers that they cannot afford a home, they need two jobs to cover the grocery bill, they can’t get ahead, can’t afford childcare, can’t retire, they don’t necessarily conclude: ‘The political economy of labour has shifted in favour of capital.’  Instead, they tend to think, ‘Something has gone terribly wrong.’ And then somebody like a Hanson, or a Farage or a Trump, comes along and says, ‘No. It’s not you. It’s them. The migrants. The trans kids. The Others.’” —John Birmingham, Another Country

ABOUT THE AUTHOR….

John Birmingham’s books include He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, On Father and many works of fiction, including the Axis of Time and Cruel Stars series. He is the author of two previous Quarterly Essays, Appeasing Jakarta and A Time for War.