Painting Fakes

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...

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...

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 ...

Catholics around the world, and many who are not Catholic, are mourning the death of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, following his death on Easter Sunday. Pope Francis was responsible for many firsts.  He was the first Pope from the Americas, and from the Southern Hemisphere.  He was also the first Pope to take the name Francis, after Francis of Assisi, famous for his devotion to the poor and his teaching that God's love encompasses the whole of Creation.  During his 12-year reign as Pope he tried to live out this example - living simply in the Vatican guest-house rather than the Papal Palace, washing the feet of prisoners on Palm Sunday, visiting and shining a light on what he called 'marginal places' where people struggled with poverty and oppression.  Much of his teaching reflected this priority. No one person can rule an institution with a billion members, not even one as hierarchical as the Catholic Church.  The church of which Francis took over l...

A couple of times in this series on degrowth I've talked about billionaires - about how economic growth is actually fueling increases in rich people's yacht money , not the basic needs of ordinary people, and about how our social fragmentation and the control of our media by similarly rich people means we are largely unaware of this fact and frightened to challenge the status quo for fear of losing our precarious security.  In this post I'd like to talk in a bit more detail about our billionaire problem. I consider myself wealthy.  After over four decades of professional careers and now in our 60s, Lois and I are debt free, own the house we live in and have a healthy superannuation balance.  We can look forward to a secure, comfortable retirement.  We are better off than 80% of the world's population. Now, we have simple tastes, we don't need a vast amount of money to live on.  I understand that some people have more expensive hobbies than we do - they want to ...