Painting Fakes

Given current polling, one of the possible outcomes of the coming State election is a hung parliament, meaning that government will need to be formed with the support of independents and minor parties. Our major parties both hate this idea, and try to persuade voters against it.  Both parties are currently saying they won't form a minority government with the support of the cross-benches.  I don't think that promise is worth the air it was spoken into.  If we have a hung parliament, at least one of them will do a deal, even though they don't like it. They say they don't like minority government because it creates instability, but actually it's just because they are so bad at negotiation.  Plenty of countries have multi-party governments as a matter of routine, and they include some of the most stable democracies on the planet. The Queensland electoral system makes things difficult for minor parties.  We have no upper house, and a lower house made up exclusivel

I mentioned in my previous post that the LNP has been working hard for the past three years to create a climate of anxiety.  One person who doesn't seem to need much help to become anxious is Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk. Every time I have seen her in the media over the last three years her face has worn an anxious, harried expression.  She even wears it in the election advertising that has appeared on our TVs this week.  The only time it left her face was in the press conference she gave following the announcement of the election date.  Presumably she was told by her media advisers that she should smile more, so she tried one at the end of the conference.  It wasn't convincing. Of course she has a lot to be anxious about.  She was a low-profile cabinet minister in the Bligh Government - her most senior post was as Minister for Transport and Multicultural Affairs in the final year of the government.  Then following the electoral rout of March 2012 she found herse

So, Campbell Newman has finally decided to put us all out of our misery by calling the 2015 election for January 31 this year.  His stated reason - that he wanted to provide certainty for business - tells you a lot about our present Liberal-National Party government.  This is the most business-friendly government - and people unfriendly one - we have had in a long time. I'm not going to pretend to give you an unbiased view of this election.  Let me tell you right up front, I won't be voting LNP.  Not that I'm much of a fan of the Labor Party either.  They have largely sold out to the same business interests as the LNP, but at least they are able to soften it with a slender padding of social responsibility.  I would like to be able to vote for a genuinely socially progressive alternative, but in the current environment I have to accept that my preferences will eventually flow back Labor's way. Anyway, having got that out of the way up front, I want to talk to you abo

Reading Leo Tolstoy's religious writings earlier this year made me want to have another go at reading Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity.   I began to read this book some years ago, only to find that the copy in my hands was a misprint and half the text was missing.  Life intervened, and it took Tolstoy to remind me of it. In some ways, Ellul was a French equivalent to the Englishman CS Lewis.  Like Lewis he was a prominent Christian intellectual of more or less orthodox Protestant views.  Like Lewis, he had a depth of theological knowledge but was mostly self-taught (although Ellul did complete most of a theology degree before the Second World War intervened) while pursuing an academic career in a different discipline (Ellul in sociology, Lewis in literature). Of course there are also differences.  Lewis wrote for a popular audience and much of his writing is highly accessible.  Ellul was far more "intellectual" and his writing can be dense and diffi

It seems that this Christmas I can't get away from renditions of The Little Drummer Boy .  Here is the one I enjoyed most, from Walk Off the Earth. I don't really know what's with the dogs.  If you prefer something more traditional here's an  a capella  version by Pentatonix. In case you haven't had it drummed into you by years of repetition over shopping centre sound systems and in Christmas concerts and pageants, the lyric goes like this: Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum A new born King to see, pa rum pum pum pum Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum,  rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, So to honour Him, pa rum pum pum pum,  When we come. Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum That's fit to give a king, pa rum pum pum rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum,

A few weeks ago I wrote about the idea of "lone wolf terrorism" .  Now we have had our own version of the same thing, a terrifying and spectacular act of violence in which an Iranian immigrant called Man Horan Monis held a group of staff and customers hostage in a cafe in Sydney's Martin Place for 16 hours.  The standoff ended with Monis' death and that of two of his hostages. In its wake, government leaders and commentators have been asking the same question I did.  Was Monis a terrorist, or was he just a criminal?  On the one hand, he had a history of espousing radical Islamism and claimed to be acting in support of the Islamic State.  On the other hand, he didn't even have an IS flag to display, and had to ask police negotiators to bring him one.  His previous crimes appear to include writing hate letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan along with violence of a less political nature including a string of sexual assaults and bei

In the last few weeks we've had some very sad stories in our media.  Police shootings of mentally ill young men, children dying from drinking unprocessed milk, our government winning the right to treat asylum seekers with unprecedented cruelty....  In the midst of this are two tragic crimes. On November 23 some people out for a Sunday morning cycle heard strange noises coming from a partly covered drain beside Sydney's M7 freeway.  They investigated and found a newborn baby boy abandoned in the drain.  Doctors judged that the child had been there for 6 days.  The lucky boy is now recovering in foster care and his mother has been found and charged with attempted murder. Just a week later , two young children playing on Maroubra Beach in Sydney uncovered the remains of another infant who turned out to be a baby girl.  Sadly this child did not survive and the remains were badly decomposed.  The search for her mother is still ongoing. These stories produce a complex re

Australia's current little piece of political theatre, aside from the lunatic fringe festival that is the Palmer United Party, is provided by the fall-out from Barack Obama's speech at the University of Queensland during the G20 .  In speaking about global climate change, Obama said "the incredible glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened" and went on to express the desire that his daughters, and their children, would be able to visit it long into the future. It seems like a mild and self-evident thing to say, but in the delicate and nuanced world of diplomacy it has been understood as a rebuke of the Australian Government for trying - unsuccessfully as it turned out - to keep climate change off the G20 agenda. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop (oddly not Environment Minister Greg Hunt) has come out swinging.  "Of course, the Great Barrier Reef will be conserved for generations to come. And we do not believe that it is in danger," Ms Bishop said.  He

So here we are, in sunny Brisbane, Awestralia, on the day after the G20. For most of the world the event lasted two days, but for us here in Brisbane it seems to have been going on for months.  We have been peppered with mixed messages all year.  At one moment we were being warned of potential terrorist attacks and violent and disruptive protesters.  The next we were hearing the benefits of democracy extolled.  One moment we were being told about road closures, traffic chaos, public transport disruptions and heavy security around a rather large exclusion zone.  The next were being begged to come into town and join in the fun of the expensive G20 Cultural Celebration. In the event the terrorists stayed away altogether along with the large proportion of Brisbane residents who took advantage of the long weekend to go elsewhere.  The protests were peaceful and creative, with people dressing up, creating events and generally performing for the huge international media contingent.  Th

Over the past few weeks we've been hearing a new term in interviews and statements from government ministers and the heads of national security agencies - "lone wolf terrorism".  I've been trying for a little while to come to terms with this concept and what it means. I think it's helpful to think about the deliberate killing of human beings as taking place along a continuum, as shown below. I'm not suggesting this is a moral continuum.  All these forms of killing are awful.  The continuum is related to the public or political nature of the act. Murder is essentially a private act.  When Brett Cowan killed Daniel Morcombe he was indulging his own twisted enjoyment of seeing someone else suffer.  When Carl Williams killed or arranged the killing of various members and associates of the Moran family he was protecting and extending his family's control of Melbourne's illicit drug trade.  When Adam Lanza shot 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary Sch

Some of last week's thoughts about privatisation  were prompted by reading French economist Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, passed on to me by my generous cousin Michael. Piketty's book is economics on a grand scale.  He sets out to tell the story of global capital accumulation over the past two centuries.  To do so, he draws on an impressive (if not quite truly global) collection of historical data on wealth collated by himself and a number of other economists over the past decade, published in sources such as the World Top Incomes Database . This is not exactly an easy book to read, but nor is it the kind of impenetrable tome produced by so many professional economists.  Anyone who has some basic economic literacy will have no trouble grasping his arguments and if its 500-plus pages seem daunting take heart, there's a fair amount of repetition involved.  If you take economic issues seriously (as we all should!) this book is essential reading.