Painting Fakes

Here's my latest letter to our dear Prime Minister.  I've broadened the ask to take in three things that are uppermost in my heart at the moment.  After all, you're allowed to ask for more than one thing for Christmas aren't you? *** Dear Prime Minister I trust you have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and return to work ready to face the considerable demands that 2021 will bring. I have many wishes for 2021, some of which have nothing to do with you.   However, one of my wishes is for better government in 2021, from you and your colleagues.   This wish could be summed up in one main theme – end the divisive, partisan slanging match that politics has become, and get on with making the difficult decisions that we all need. The silver lining in the cloud of 2020’s pandemic is that for a short time, our governments (State/Territory and Commonwealth) worked together irrespective of political colour via the National Cabinet.   However, it didn’t take long to return

I just finished reading Marian Wilkinson's The Carbon Club.   It was horrific and depressing.  You should read it too.  Then afterwards you should read something nice and hopeful to cleanse your mind. Wilkinson is an investigative journalist who has worked for the Fairfax papers back when Fairfax was a thing, and for the ABC's Four Corners.  As part of this, she has covered climate change policy for many years and decided to put it all in a book.  The fact that I knew a lot of the story already didn't help, it was still depressing to see it all chronicled, step by step.  She tells the story of how Australia's climate policy was scuttled by the fossil fuel lobby, working through its friends in the Liberal and National Parties.  I don't need to rehearse the whole story, and it would take too long.  If you really want to hear it you can read the book yourself.  Let me just tell you six things I learned from the book which seem to me highly pertinent to our current peri

So, in honour of the Gas-Fired Recovery (TM) and the Technology Roadmap (TM) I have included the Minister for Energy and (ensuring there is no) Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor in my latest Dear Scomo letter. My source of hope (and don't we all need hope?) is that the federal Liberal and National Parties are part of a small and decreasing number of people and organisations who still don't get that climate action is essential.  The climate war is over, but our current Commonwealth Government is like one of those Japanese soldiers still holed up in some remote jungle, not having heard the news and still holding their posts for the Emperor.  We need to entice them out and give them the good news so that they can get on with their jobs. *** Dear Prime Minister and Minister I trust you and your families are well and thriving through the COVID crisis. Thanks to your success in keeping COVID-19 at bay so far (and trusting we continue to do a god job on this front!) we are now able to

A little after 8.00pm on Monday, 15 June, Noel Henry was riding his bicycle to his home in the Adelaide suburb of Kilburn when he was pulled over by the police.  They told him they suspected him of being in possession of drugs, and ordered him to put his hands on his head so they could search him.  According to the police statement released the next day, he 'originally was compliant and after a short time he began to refuse. Police attempted to arrest the man who resisted and a struggle ensued.'   The noise of this struggle alerted his friends who came out of the house.  Some of them filmed parts of the incident and subsequently posted their films on social media.  They show three police officers holding Henry on the ground, one of them hitting him, and his head being forcibly pushed down onto the concrete footing of the fence they have pinned him against.  All this while his friends yell at the police to 'get off his head' and 'let his head up', while others

So it's been a few months and last week was the Student Climate Strike, staged online as everything is at the moment.  I admire those kids for their persistence to keep going when it seems doubly hopeless, so decided it was time for my next letter to our esteemed Prime Minister.  Here it is for your reading pleasure.  Others have said similar things, not really my idea, but the more of us say it the more they have to listen. Dear Prime Minister I trust you and your family are well and thriving through the COVID crisis. I would like to thank and congratulate you and your government, and our State governments, on your astute handling of the crisis.   It’s been reassuring to see the speed and effectiveness with which our governments have reacted, and the success this has brought about in keeping the number of infections low.   No doubt there is a long way to go and there will be twists and turns along the way, but so far so good. To me, your success rests on fo

Last year I wrote three letters to the Prime Minister urging him and his government to get serious about climate change (you can read them here , here , and here ).  Then we had some bushfires.  Unprecedented, nation-defining fires in all six States and the ACT.   Surely after this we couldn't keep going with business as usual?  Well apparently, to all intents and purposes we still might.  So I wrote another letter.  I've been agonising over this one for more than a month.  How do you say to the leader of your country, a very publicly practicing Christian, in the politest terms possible that it is time to repent?  Anyhow, this week I finally finished it and popped it in the mail. Bearing in mind that there is a heated internal debate in the Coalition on this subject, and also that Scomo's office is stacked to the rafters with coal industry stooges, I also sent copies to all the Queensland LNP Senators, as well as to my local (Labor) member to whom I have sent a