Painting Fakes

I've always been a sucker for a good post-apocalyptic tale. Even a bad one can do it for me at a pinch. As a teenager I loved "Hothouse" by Brian Aldiss, in which a small group of humans travel through a massive tropical forest. It's a fantastic 1960s version of the greenhouse effect in which either the trees have grown, or the people have shrunk, so they're the comparative size of beetles. This week I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", to make up for missing the movie. In between was the book I've loved more than anything I've read in the past couple of years, Jim Crace's "The Pesthouse". Part of the fascination of these books is imagining what the world might become in the future. In "Hothouse" it's just that, a supercharged landscape of exuberant vegetation. In "The Road" it's almost the precise opposite, a nuclear cataclysm (one presumes) leaving everything dead - blackene...

I'm going to break one of my blogging rules and talk about my work. After all, it's my blog and I can do what I want, and besides it's not the first time . When I was a young housing activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a bit of time on the executive of National Shelter. This organisation was, and still is, Australia's peak non-profit housing advocacy organisation, and is basically a federation of State and Territory organisations. At this time, we had a small amount of funding from the Commonwealth Government so we had a couple of underpaid staff and were able to be active on the lobbying front in a low profile kind of way. However, the organisation as a whole was struggling. Very few of our State branches had any money, and most were like the Queensland branch I represented, a few people who would get together in whatever time we could make in our regular jobs. Representatives from the State and Territory branches used to meet once a quarter, over a Fri...

If we needed any more evidence that the relentless campaign by climate change deniers is working, we need look no further than the Australian Government's late April decision to delay introduction of its carbon trading scheme until at least 2013. The Prime Minister provides two reasons - his government can't get the sceme through the Senate, and global responses have been slower in coming than expected. I was a bit cheered up, but not much, when immediately after this the government had a sharp fall in its popularity. Only a bit, because what's happened is our government has gone from aspiring to global leadership to being just another follower. The loss of momentum resulting from the failure of the Copenhagen talks, and the last minute refusal of the Opposition to support a modified scheme, has resulted in the whole thing grinding to a halt. The Government is clearly in a difficult position. It has only 32 seats in in the 76-seat Senate , which means it needs to attract at...

Kutz has posed the question, "what does the bible say about competitive sport?". An important question for us Aussie blokes because we love our sport. In one sense it's an easy question to answer because the bible says nothing (or virtually nothing) about it. Well, not directly. I think the closest the Bible comes to sport is the story of David and Goliath. Goliath wanders about in front of the ranks, challenging the Israelites to send someone out to fight him one on one and decide the whole battle on that one contest. This is representative sport at its most serious, but they obviously don't mean quite what they say, because after David kills Goliath they have a massive battle anyway, which the Israelites win with great slaughter. Still, this is one way to look at sport - as a symbolic battle between competing groups of people. It took on a slightly different form at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Nazi regime tried to use the contest to show the supremacy of...

In my newspaper today I read that Belgium has beaten France to become the first European nation to ban the burka and other face-covering garments in public places. The vote was carried 136 to nil, with two abstentions. Amnesty International was quick to condemn the ban as a violation of human rights. The law has also outraged Muslims. Islamic scholar Michael Privot says Belgium "now joins Iran and Saudi Arabia in that exclusive but unenviable rare club of countries to impose a dress code in the public domain". If you think he's right, you should try going shopping in your underwear. But beyond such silliness, there are some real issues at stake here about religious freedom, prejudice and fear of the "other". In general, liberal societies (of which Belgium is one) are based on the premise that citizens are free to make their own choices on matters that concern them, provided these don't interfere unduly with someone else's freedom. You can listen to w...