Painting Fakes

So now it's official, Joe Hockey's first budget is a shocker. His metaphorical language has taken a new turn.  Along with the task of "budget repair" we now now have the image of lifting.  Australians, he says, are "lifters not leaners" and this budget is about doing "heavy lifting" to get rid of government debt and move us back into surplus. It is highly debatable whether getting back into surplus is as important as Hockey wants us to think, but this morning I'm worried about less esoteric questions.  Like, who exactly is doing all this lifting?  Joe himself and his parliamentary colleagues are symbolically doing a little, accepting a 12-month pay freeze.  Meanwhile, 16,500 lower-ranking public servants will do a lot more, losing their jobs and having to look elsewhere, perhaps ending up doing real lifting as labourers on one of the many road building projects flagged in this budget. However, by far the heaviest lifting will be done b

Tuesday will bring the unveiling of the first Abbott-Hockey budget, so I thought I'd prepare by reading the report of the National Commission of Audit .  What a sorry dog's breakfast it is! It's hardly a surprise that the report is a highly ideological affair.  Not only was it commissioned by an ideologically-driven government freshly elected to office, it is controlled by a hand-picked group of right-wing opinion-makers.  The Commission's chair, Tony Shepherd, was until recently President of the Business Council of Australia and its secretariat is headed by the Business Council's Director of Policy Peter Crone.  Other commissioners vary from politically committed right wingers to more moderate conservatives.  The commissioners are supported by a substantial team of officers from Treasury and Finance, but none from the operational departments whose programs they comment on with impunity. What did  surprise me was how careless and slipshod the whole thing is.

I'm always giving the Coalition a kick about various things, so it's time I got stuck into the Labor Party for a change.  Abbott, Hockey and co are for once on the right track and it's depressing to listen to their opponents' response. Budget emergencies are the height of political fashion at the moment.  Our current Queensland Government has been proclaiming one for the past two years.  It is a multi-purpose piece of rhetoric, allowing them to whack their opponents over the head, justify cuts to programs they don't like and soften us up for more quixotic asset sales.  Their colleagues over the border must think it's working because we now seem to also have one a Commonwealth level and the new Tasmanian Liberal Government has just announced one down there. The word "emergency" seems highly inappropriate to this context.  The credit ratings agencies don't seem too worried and the worst that has happened is governments going from AAA to AA+.

Earlier this year I spent a couple of days at Milmerran, a little town on Queensland's Darling Downs.  It has a population of a few hundred, surrounded by cattle farms and increasingly by CSG wells.  I was there for work, but I did get time to have a little walk around town (it didn't take long) and found this place. It's called Anzac Memorial Park, and it sits on Milmerran's main street, just out of the little strip of shops that passes for a town centre.  It's nothing that special - it has a few little bits of play equipment, a band rotunda, a public toilet, some nice trees and open lawns, a few benches here and there.  Pretty much like any park in any town or city in Australia. It also has this - a monument engraved with the names of all the local young men who lost their lives in the First World War.  Around the base has been added a second list of names, of those who died in the Second World War. This memorial is obviously well cared for.  The

It's Good Friday in two days, the day we commemorate Jesus' death.  At St Andrew's South Brisbane each year we have a series of meditations, and I'm responsible for one of them this year.  This meditation brings together three things.  The first is the chosen reading, from Matthew 26:46-68, which includes Jesus’ arrest in the garden and his sham trial before the High Priest Caiaphas. The second is the framework for this year's series, “Jesus the real King”.  In what sense is it possible to see Jesus as a king when he is so obviously powerless? The third is the religious thought of Leo Tolstoy .  Later in his life, after he had written his great novels, Tolstoy experienced a profound conversion.  He came to understand that following Jesus meant obeying his command to love our neighbours as ourselves, to do to others what we want them to do to us.  If we take this seriously, he says, we will not try to kill one another in war, we will not flog or impris

I promise to stop banging on about Pink Floyd after this but I just wanted to share one more thing with you. It's one of my favourite pieces of Pink Floyd music, 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene'.  It was apparently first performed in 1968, written by Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason, and it exists in a number of different recorded forms as it morphed slightly from day to day and from year to year.  Here's a live performance from 1972. Pink Floyd's earliest studio recordings, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets,  give a very imperfect idea of the kind of band they were.  Their early producer Norm Smith wanted them to be a pop band like The Beatles.   Syd Barrett and then Roger Waters and Rick Wright did their best to oblige, writing and recording their best approximations of three minute pop songs, and these formed the bulk of the first two albums. Their live performances, on the other hand, were highly improvisational affairs.  Most o

So, to continue my Pink Floyd odyssey. One of the most intriguing things about Pink Floyd is the fact that although  Syd Barrett was only part of the band for such a short time his influence and, in a sense, his presence lingered long after he left. In the early years after his departure it's not necessarily so obvious.  Their songs didn't openly reference him and they seemed to be carrying on smoothly with David Gilmour in his place.  However, although their music gradually became more structured and sophisticated, it still had Syd's fingerprints on it.  For instance, even though Syd was the only member whose use of hallucinogenics went beyond the odd experiment, they continued to write "psychedelic" songs after his departure.  You would swear Roger Waters' 'Cirrus Minor'   and 'Julia Dream' or Rick Wright's 'Remember a Day' and 'Paintbox' were inspired by LSD, but neither Waters nor Wright used the stuff.  They were co

At the end of the 1870s Count Leo Tolstoy seemed to have everything.  He was in the prime of his life and in excellent health.  He was the owner of a hereditary title and a large, profitable estate. He was happily married with a growing brood of children.   War and Peace and Anna Karenina  had made him one of the most celebrated novelists in Europe. Yet he was profoundly unhappy.  He detested his great novels almost as soon as he had finished them.  He felt uneasy about his title and his wealth.  He felt that his life had no value and no meaning and if this was the case, what was the point of bringing children into the world? The result of all this dissatisfaction was three years of intense, harrowing soul-searching which he describes in A Confession .   He scoured the works of contemporary philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers trying to understand the meaning and purpose of life.  Nothing helped him.  The only conclusion he could reach was that life was pointless and abs

This evening I get to preach on what for me is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible, the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Galatians.  Here's roughly what I'm going to say. Galatians is a passionate letter written by Paul to a group of churches in Galatia, shown on the map.  It's not entirely clear who he's writing to but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the recipients were the churches in the south of the province - at Iconium, Lystra, Derbe and Pisidian Antioch - which he and Barnabas founded on the first journey they took after being commissioned by the church in Syrian Antioch.  He certainly seems to have known his correspondents personally and talks to them as a spiritual father.  These cities were multicultural communities, Greek colonies in a region inhabited by Celts, ruled by Roman overlords, and the churches there would almost certainly have been multiracial. The letter addresses one of the most cruc