Painting Fakes

It's the first anniversary of the Voice referendum , and I've been reading Shireen Morris's Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum.  Morris is not an Aboriginal person but she is a constitutional lawyer and from 2013 onwards she worked for the Cape York Institute (CYI) under the leadership and guidance of Noel Pearson, first as an employee and later as an academic continuing their close collaboration.  No-one was closer than her to the events that led up to the Referendum, and I learned a lot reading her story. The story begins in 2012.  The then Labor Government had appointed an Expert Panel to advise on options for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  Its key recommendation was to add a racial non-discrimination clause to the Constitution as a way of fleshing out the race power added in 1967.  This proposal was quickly and roundly trashed by conservative lawyers, with Greg Craven, one of our leading right-...

Over the past four decades the world's wealthy nations, including Australia, have been undertaking a vast social and economic experiment.  Whether you think this experiment has been a success, or a colossal failure, depends on how rich you are. This experiment is generally called 'neoliberalism' by progressive people like me.  More conservative people are more likely to call it 'free market economics' or the more fuzzy 'economic reform'.  The core idea that drives this experiment is that markets are the most potent and efficient way of organising production and consumption of both good and services. This has several implications for the way governments should act. They shouldn't compete with private sector entities, and should sell any government entities that do so.  Hence the wave of privatisations around the globe. They should keep their regulation of market activity to a minimum, as this interferes with the 'free' operation of markets. They s...

 Scott Morrison has finally left the Australian Parliament. "What?" I hear you say.  "Is he still there?" Indeed, for the past year and a half he has been lurking there in the back row, keeping out of the spotlight as much as possible.  Presumably he has been looking for the right job to move on to.  Is it churlish to suggest that offers were slow in coming?  That perhaps his time as Prime Minister did serious damage to his reputation? The recent ABC documentary, Nemesis,  displaying the entrails of the nine years of Liberal/National government, doesn't exactly make him more appealing.  His various colleagues and State counterparts range from diplomatic to scathing.  Some suggest he did a good job of the pandemic response.  Some of them talk about him as decisive, hard working, committed.  Yet he is also called a bully, a misogynist, a liar and a hypocrite.  The man himself sits through his long interview, leaning uncomfortably forw...

In his writings - both his award-winning novel/memoir No Friend but the Mountains and his journalism, recently collected and analysed in Freedom, only Freedom  - Behrooz Boochani talks about what he calls the 'Kyriarchal System'.  This term is his and Omid Tofighian's translation of the Farsi term system-e hakim.   Tofighian attempts to explain the term as follows: [it] can be translated in numerous ways ... sovereign system, controlling system, ruling system, governmental system, dominating system, oppressive system, subjugating system, ruling system ... but none of these actually capture the essence of what Behrouz is saying.... Wikipedia tells us: In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a singl...

( Content warning: this post discusses child sexual abuse and sexual assault.) I have to say I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the Australian of the Year award.  Often the person who receives it is someone I've never heard of, and as often as not I am none the wiser at the end of their term.  Theoretically they get to use their status to promote the work and issues which got them there in the first place.  The 2023 recipient is Taryn Brumfitt , the leader of the Body Image Movement which tries to counter the negative messages women and girls get through their lives about their bodies and build a more positive culture around our physical selves.  It sounds like a good thing, but I had to look that up just now for this article.  I was more familiar with her predecessor Dylan Alcott but I heard a lot less of him in 2022 when he was using his platform to promote disability inclusion than than I did in previous years when he was winning tennis tournaments....

It's easy to criticise governments, but hard to be one.  How do you solve the pressing problems facing our world, in the face of powerful forces that don't want them solved and a population fed on distraction and disinformation?  This dilemma means, as I have been saying in various ways on this blog for some years now, that our problems won't be solved by electing the right government, they will only be solved by each of us working hard to change course and take our governments along with us. Sometimes this appears a forlorn hope but plenty of activists encourage us not to give in to this sort of despair.  Recently I reviewed Rebecca Solnit's lovely book, Hope in the Dark ,  in which she shows that despite what we might think, the activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have had a surprising amount of success.  We should celebrate this success, and keep working to achieve more. Tim Hollo points us in a slightly different direction in his new book, Li...

As the Labor Party gets ready to introduce its climate change legislation into Parliament next week, the myth of the 'Greens 2009 sabotage of good climate policy' is doing great service in making Labor look like persecuted saints. We're even seeing the line repeated uncritically on supposedly neutral news shows like the ABC's 7.30. It's a myth or, if you prefer, it's a lie. Don't fall for it. The 2009 CPRS was a fatally compromised piece of pro-fossil-fuel greenwash, and the 2011-12 alternative was a big improvement. What the Greens should learn from their interactions with the Rudd/Gillard government is that blocking legislation can be a good move. They prevented a bad policy and negotiated a much better one. It achieved real emissions reductions, and CEFC and ARENA were cleverly set up so that they are still doing their work despite 9 years of Coalition sabotage. They should also learn that Labor can be mightily incompetent at promoting good legislatio...