Painting Fakes

When my family became Australian citizens it was a very low-key affair.  Mum and Dad never had any interest in ceremony and were not particularly patriotic, so we skipped the public ceremony and took our pledge in the Brisbane office of the Immigration Department in the presence of an appropriately-ranking public servant.  At least, Mum, Dad and my sister did.  I was still under 16 and automatically became a citizen when my parents did. So I actually attended my first ever citizenship ceremony this week, supporting another relative.  It was an interesting event, because it emphasised just how much we are a nation of immigrants.  Brisbane's Deputy Mayor Adrian Schrinner, son of German immigrants, conducted the formal part of the ceremony.  Member for Brisbane Therese Gambaro, whose parents came from Italy, represented the Immigration Minister. These longer-standing immigrants welcomed new ones, proclaiming how happy they were that their parents had chos...

There's so much carnage in this week's Commonwealth Budget that small things are apt to slip by.  So I'm going to tell you about something from my professional life that has just become a casualty of Abbott and Hockey's slash and burn exercise.  It's a scheme called the National Rental Affordability Scheme. Back in 2004 National Shelter, the Community Housing Federation of Australia, the Australian Council of Social Services, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Housing Industry Association, supported by a wide range of other organisations with an interest in housing, convened a National Affordable Housing Summit.  It came up with a simple but ambitious plan of action aimed at improving Australia's housing system, and set up a working party under the leadership of Julian Disney to promote this plan around the country.  They were very successful, and large parts of their agenda were adopted by the Labor government on its election in 2007. One of ...

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 t...