Painting Fakes

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 ...

Privatisation, lately rebadged as "asset sales", is electoral poison for political parties and their leaders in Australia.  In 2008, after NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma proposed to privatise parts of the state's electricity system, he was rolled at the party's State Conference by a huge margin and resigned as Premier soon after. Queensland's Labor Premier Anna Bligh didn't quite manage to learn the lesson.  Soon after her government's re-election in 2009 she announced a privatisation process that included parts of Queensland Rail, various forestry assets, the Abbot Point Coal Terminal and the Port of Brisbane.  Anger at this announcement was heightened by the fact that not a word was breathed on the subject during the election.  She may have hoped this anger would have faded by the 2012 election but it clearly hadn't and her party was almost wiped out . All this left the incoming LNP government with a problem.  The combination of the Global Financ...

One of my childhood treasures is a pair of books by C Walter Hodges: The Namesake  and The Marsh King.   First published in the mid-1960s, these are what would today be called "Young Adult" novels which I read for the first time in late primary or early high school.  They tell the story of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex (south England) from 871 to 899 CE, and his conflict with the invading Vikings. I loved these books and read them over and over again, especially The Namesake , narrated by an engaging character of Hodges' invention, a one-legged boy also called Alfred who is part of the king's household.  They deal with the period from just before Alfred's accession to the throne in 871 to the conclusion of his second campaign against the Vikings led by Guthrum in 878.  I'm sure Hodges would have been pleased with the impression they made on me - to this day my ears prick up whenever I hear Alfred mentioned. I recently decided to approach...

One of the things I touched on briefly in previous posts is the collective impact of our illusion of immortality .  Individually we know we will die but we push that idea away and act as if we will live for ever.  This leads us to value the wrong things - to put possessions before people, to waste time on trivialities, to put off until tomorrow what we should be doing today.  At its extremes this illusion can lead us to abuse and exploit others in the belief that our power over them will go on forever. This same process also works for us as a community.  We see our current culture or "way of life" as something immutable and eternal which needs to be protected and preserved at all costs.  This illusion, and the actions that flow from it, have some very serious consequences for our society and the way we act in the wider world. We can see this in the way our community responds to three controversial questions facing our country at the moment - our response to ...