Opinions
October 2007
Society poorer when it’s sneers all round
Nearly 20 years ago I went through a process that is sometimes referred to as “the dark night of the soul”. It is a phase of spiritual life that many people experience. The phenomenon is well known in the Catholic Church in all traditions. Openness is a virtue in public life. What an impoverished world
The Apprentice Dog Whistler
Over recent months, Minister Kevin Andrews has been bringing the new Australian Citizenship Test to fruition. This is a policy destined to fail utterly in its stated intention – “to help new citizens to embrace education, employment and other opportunities in Australia”, according to the Government – but succeed in sending a message to voters
September 2007
Child sexualisation is no game
Today’s little girls aren’t tottering around in mum’s high heels. These days, nothing could be more daggy for a primary school girl than pretending to be her mum, or any other normal adult. So – at the risk of sounding repetitive – everyone please take note: premature sexualisation has nothing to do with children’s creative
Obesity, a cure for loss of identity
While we stigmatise fat people, perhaps they are behaving normally in a sick social environment. The answer then is not diets, drugs and surgery but a wholesale change in the culture of consumption, which itself is a reaction to the emptiness of affluence.
Aviation and global warming: a change in the air?
Comments this week by Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull suggest that the Government is beginning to realise the incompatibility between endless growth in the aviation sector and the prevention of dangerous climate change. Even if Australia adopts a lower target of 60% reductions by 2050, as the Labor Party has proposed, aviation could still gobble
Hidden doom of climate change
The Prime Minister, various ministers and the fossil fuel lobby have for years claimed that cutting emissions would be economically ruinous, cause massive job losses and destroy our international competitiveness. None of these claims is backed by credible evidence and can easily be shown to be false.
April 2007
Poorer boomers aren’t looking forward to retirement
Bashing baby boomers is becoming so passe. The Howard Government’s Intergenerational Report found that the ageing of the population does not constitute a crisis but rather a fairly manageable transition. Despite this, a number of commentators continue to insist that the age pension claims of a large cohort of boomers will put unsustainable pressure on
From Bambi To Bimbo
As parents and professionals who work with children point out, the time and energy that they currently spend in trying to protect children from the advertising and media onslaught (as well as in healing the damage it causes) would be far better spent on the positive aspects of caring for children. In short, if government
March 2007
Sensationalism no way to fight drug addiction
Drugs policy arouses strong emotions. People see drug users and fear the unknown. The traditional response from politicians, particularly conservatives, has been to exploit these fears for political gain. The outcome has been an over-reliance on law enforcement as a means of stamping out both the supply and use of harmful drugs. It is hoped
Cooking the greenhouse books
The Government dismissed the Institute’s report, claiming we don’t understand the Kyoto accounting rules and didn’t make adjustments for differences in methods. These claims are false (and are addressed in a paper available on the Institute’s website). Even if they were correct, the fact remains that NCAS is a black box: its data are not
Adult world must let girls be girls
Rather than being empowered, children are being exploited by the process of sexualisation. For children seeking to become empowered in an adult world, a more promising route is to focus on developing cognitive and emotional capacities that enable them to negotiate power relations more maturely and with less risk to themselves. There is nothing wrong
February 2007
Public money wasted on tourism
Despite the fanfare that surrounds major events, the reality is that state and territory governments are often spending large sums of taxpayer money in attempts to divert events, tourists, jobs and associated revenue from one part of Australia to another, and from one industry to another.
Promises, promises
There cannot be a competitive market for water while the Government continues to subsidise agriculture through such things as drought assistance and half-price water delivery. All in all, the plan looks more like a deft political move than a serious attempt to solve our water problems. It is, as Shakespeare once said, all sound and
January 2007
Silencing the critics
Like individual citizens, community groups are being worn down and are increasingly reluctant to engage in the democratic process because they no longer believe that they can make a difference. At the same time, certain influential business lobbies have been brought into the fold, along with a few tame or uncritical NGOs such as Mission
The repression of the bleeding hearts
The outcome for the broader Australian polity is that the knowledge and breadth of experience collected together in the NGO community is having much less influence on how we develop as a society than it should. Like individual citizens, community groups are being increasingly reluctant to engage in the democratic process because they no longer
Climate change initiatives are just so much soufflae
The Government needs to overcome its ideological prejudice against all things environmental. Its conservative voter base will, if it hasn’t already. They realise that the effects of climate change will be felt in their lifetime and that material prosperity must go hand-in-hand with sound environmental stewardship.
December 2006
It’s life, but certainly not as we want it
Plans revealed this week to squeeze a further 1.1 million people into Sydney over the next 25 years will transform it into the nation’s least liveable city. Twenty years ago Sydney was less congested, slower, more friendly and had more green space. Unregulated population growth and timid planning are choking the city, a situation exacerbated
Ice, ice, baby
Since the early 1900s, Australias drug policies have been based on the notion that the law should be the primary mechanism for addressing drug problems. By prohibiting both the supply and use of certain undesirable drugs, governments thought they could stamp out drug use and drug-related activities. But drug markets have proved remarkably resistant to
Lack of political will leads to problems for Earth
Back in 1999, the Government overhauled the original Commonwealth environment laws that were introduced by the Whitlam Labor government. The old laws needed updating and the Government obliged, creating the loftily titled Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. While an improvement on the original laws, the EPBC Act has proven to be a failure, largely
November 2006
Sustainability Reporting: How far have we come?
Over the last fifteen years, much effort has gone into the preparation of sustainability reports. These are reports that provide information on social and environmental as well as economic matters. This has been done in the name of improved decision making, accountability and transparency. It has also been motivated by a desire to promote ecologically
Dressing windows while the globe burns
The recent rush of activity around climate change has led some to suggest that the Federal Government has finally got the message on the perils of global warming, but history indicates such optimism is misplaced. The Government’s announcements of the past month are just more of the window-dressing and stalling tactics that we have had
Churches could hold key to salvation for the Left
Giving free rein to the market very often leads to an erosion of moral values””the work we have done on youth and pornography and on the sexualisation of children is an illustration of that. So here’s a real contradiction in the heart of conservative politicians; it astonishes me that a moral hard-liner like Tony Abbott
October 2006
Drought relief payments: a waste of money
Our national myth is that of the stoical farmer battling the elements and never succumbing. But the $1 billion plus in drought relief granted over the last few years is an expensive means of sustaining an anachronism. Sometimes we have to be cruel to be kind, and that means refusing to pretend that if we
Understanding the retiring kind
The Government argues that encouraging people to work longer is also helping them do something for their own benefit. However, increasing the retirement age is asking people to contribute time at a life stage when time is scarce. For boomers, being compelled to work later means that individuals are giving up something – time –
September 2006
Death becomes an excuse to savage ‘elites’ – now that’s nasty
Steve Irwin created a new genre of documentary called “nature nasty” which rejects attempts to portray animals in their natural environment going about their usual activities. Instead, it goes in search of the most dangerous, poisonous and bizarre and provokes animals into extreme behaviour. Irwin’s death provided a trigger for a gratuitous outpouring of hatred
August 2006
The realities of school vouchers
Under a voucher scheme, government funding would be provided on a per student basis to the school of parents’ choice, whether public or private. The amount given to each student could be the same (flat-rate vouchers) or could vary (differentiated vouchers). Vouchers could also be confined to particular students (targeted vouchers). Jennifer Buckingham, from the
A leaky ship of State
The government’s industrial relations changes were always going to be controversial, but it has done itself no favours in establishing a regime that is overseen by government agencies that are politically compromised. Until the Office of Workplace Relations and other similar agencies are truly independent of government, employees are justified in suspecting that there is
A trump card in the nuclear power play
Green consumerism such as that advocated by Tim Flannery privatises responsibility for environmental decline, shifting blame from elected governments and industry onto the shoulders of individual citizens. The cause of climate change becomes the responsibility of “all of us”, which, in effect, means nobody. It is obvious why a government that wants to do nothing
June 2006
Traditional media still the one
The Federal Government’s plans to repeal the cross-media ownership laws are due before Cabinet in the next few weeks. There is little doubt they will get the tick of approval and then slide through parliament – thereby ensuring greater concentration of media ownership and a loss of diversity in Australia’s media. The Australian media is
Cheating our way towards Kyoto
In the last minutes of the 1997 Kyoto conference on climate change, Australia extracted a vital concession by insisting that countries be allowed to include emissions from land clearing in their greenhouse accounting. The Government knew that land clearing had declined sharply since the accepted base year of 1990, so even before the ink was
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