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Unity and Uniformity

I keep stumbling across something I find really perplexing, a vision of Australian unity which sounds innocuous, but is not. Because it's summer, let's start with a cricket tale.  You have probably heard of Usman Khawaja, a Pakistani-born Australian cricketer who has just announced his retirement at the age of 39 after a long, successful career playing Test cricket for Australia.  He is the first Pakistani-born player, and the first Muslim, to play cricket for Australia.  He is devoted to his Islamic faith, not in the sense of thinking everyone else should be a Muslim, but in the way it orders his life - he reads the Koran and prays every day, attends Friday prayers and fasts during Ramadan when cricket schedules permit, refrains from alcohol, is devoted to his family and generally tries to live by the tenets of his faith.  As he's got older he's also been more prepared to speak out on wider issues - combating racism in sport and elsewhere, calling out racist abuse i...
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Reforming Our Environmental Laws

Way back when it was elected in 2022, Australia's Labor Government promised much needed reforms to Australia's environment laws.  These laws were delayed time and again, with the Nature Positive Bills only introduced into Parliament in late 2024.  If reports are correct, the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek reached a deal with the Greens to pass them with some amendments, only for the Prime Minister to pull the plug after some strategic lobbying from the WA Premier.  Perhaps he felt it was too close to the election and he didn't want to give the Opposition a stick to beat him with.   Anyway, finally we have a new bit of legislation in late 2025 and the new Minister, Senator Murray Watt, is suddenly in an awful hurry to have it pass.  Unfortunately it's not very good, but fortunately the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee is holding an inquiry into it and taking submissions.  Here is mine.  If you want to, you can ...
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Cobalt Red

It's very possible that we could act quickly to limit climate change, and yet still end up making the world significantly worse.  The best way to ensure we do this is to allow the world's mega-wealthy - the 3,000 plus people who have wealth of over a billion dollars or, even worse, the 15 or so who own over $100b - to keep their wealth.   Cover of 'Cobalt Red' If you want to know why this is, read Siddharth Kara's book, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.   Published in 2023, the book is an investigation into the cobalt mining industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable batteries.  This means it is integral to the process of decarbonisation.  Mobile phones, laptops, electric vehicles, grid-scale 'big batteries' - every electrical device big and small uses cobalt.  The end users of this wonder metal are among the world's most recognisable and profitable global corporations - S...
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The Sad Story of Nauru

Nauru is back in the Australian news which can only mean one thing - Australia is about to exile some more refugees there.  Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke went to Nauru last week for a series of meetings that culminated in a deal for Nauru to provide permanent residence for up to 280 asylum seekers.  In return, Australia has agreed to pay the Nauru government a one-off $400m and then $70m per year thereafter.  It's not clear how long this nonsense will continue but if we assume it will last for five years, it will cost the Australian government a total of $750m, or $2.7m per asylum seeker. Nauru from the air. It just so happens that I went to Nauru for a few days some years ago.  I can't tell you what I did there, but I can tell you that it was a depressing place.  There were a lot of asylum seekers there at the time, living under a regime known as 'open detention'.  That is to say, they were free to roam the island at will.  Some were still living i...
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One Blood

I'm feeling slightly pleased with myself at the moment because after hearing about it for years, I finally made it to the end of John Harris's One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter withe Christianity - A Story of Hope.  I'm only 35 years late - the book was published in 1990, although I first heard of it around 10 years ago.  In my defence I would say that until recently it was out of print, and also that it's LONG at almost 900 pages.  This year I finally stopped making excuses, bought a second hand copy and have read it from beginning to end.   At the time he wrote the book, Harris was the Director of the Zadok Institute for Christianity and Society, an evangelical organisation dedicated to encouraging Christians to explore the implications of their faith for social issues and forerunner of what is now Ethos .  He was prompted to write it by the Bicentenary of Australia's colonisation and the fact that he was regularly asked to comment on Aborigina...
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Living With Degrowth

I wrote some articles about degrowth ( here , here , here and here ).  I always meant to write more but I also have another project called Climate/Housing  and instead I wrote a series of articles there about extreme weather events .  Then I got distracted by other things, like getting repairs done on my house.  Now I'm back and here's what may or may not be the final post in my degrowth series.   Back when I started writing about degrowth I observed that the idea makes perfect sense, but that its advocates don't seem able to outline a political pathway towards it.  This is not to say that they are naive or disengaged - far from it. It is just such a fringe political idea at the moment that most people in politics and business (heavily intertwined in most societies including ours) simply ignore it.   I don't want to be a hypocrite and write a pithy series of posts that are similarly impractical.  I mean, at least Jason Hickel and Kohei ...
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