Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, May 13, 2005
 
Travel to Nauru, Budget Talk and Theatrical Politics

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm travelling to Nauru Sunday night and won't be back in Australia until Friday 20th, in time to present my speech on the 'impact of blogging on politics and politicians' at the Blogtalk Down Under conference in Sydney. I am going back to Nauru mainly to meet with the 54 asylum seekers still detained on the island. It will be my third visit – a report on my previous visits can be found here.

This may mean an absence of postings on this website during that time. Conditions on Nauru are not conducive to easy access to the Internet, with regular power outages due to load shedding and less than ideal access to phone lines (not to mention the fact that I aim to be fairly busy). I'll try to post an update from there, but may not manage it.

To help fill the potential void in your life that may appear if there are no new entries to read on this site for a few days, you might want to listen to this podcast chat with me talking about aspects of the Budget.

For those of you who live in or are visiting Sydney (like for the BlogTalk conference), there's a new play called "The Wages of Spin" which starts on Friday 20th May (and then in Melbourne in July). You can read a bit about it by clicking here or here. I'm not always a big fan of overtly political theatre, but the same people did a show called "A Certain Maritime Incident" which I found fascinating.

The script from that show was – believe or not – derived almost totally from Hansard transcripts of the so-called Children Overboard Inquiry. It had a political message to it, but more interestingly, it was a fascinating re-interpretation of the Senate Committee process. I guess it had special interest for me as I was sort-of a character in that play, as I was part of the Inquiry, but I found it absorbing on a much wider scale.


posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, May 13, 2005 Permalink
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