Painting Fakes

One of the favourite political books from my young days was The Deep North  by Deane Wells.  It was published in 1979, the year I started university, and Wells was a Lecturer in Philosophy at my university.  His book analyses the political philosophy of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who at that time was Queensland's Premier.  Joh was a figure who loomed large over our State, an authoritarian pro-business leader who outlawed political protests and set the police onto protestors.  During his reign the Police Special Branch spied on activists and union leaders and kept secret dossiers on them, trying to find ways to implicate them in crimes.   Wells' thesis was that Joh was a genuine, dinky di fascist.  He didn't mean this in the general sense that left-wing activists often use for right-wing authoritarians.  He meant that Joh followed the philosophy outlined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, even though he had probably never read Hitler's writings .   He illustrated the point with va

 In his book Collapse,  Jared Diamond uses mining as a metaphor to explain Australia's environmental predicament. Mining in a literal sense - i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on - is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings.  In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament.  That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time and hence to deplete those resources.... Australia has been and still is 'mining' its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals.  That is, they are being exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining.  At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable and the latter aren't. I thought of t

Just in time for COP26, our government released it's new-but-not-new climate policy, Australia’s Long-Term Emissions Reduction Plan: A whole-of-economy plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.  As The Juice Media so aptly put it (with language warning!), it's not so much a plan as a planphlet.  A few weeks later, in the dead zone of a Friday evening, they released a thing which they said was the modelling behind it. It's kind of like Schroedinger's cat, simultaneously promising to cut emissions to 'net zero' and to do no such thing.  People who know what they are talking about have analysed it - like here ,  here  and here .  I'm not sure they've quite captured how absurd it is.  So in the interests of progressing the theatre of the absurd, here are seven of the many absurd things about it.  1. 'Net Zero' = 'Not Zero'. Our Minister for Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, has said several times that 'it's net zero, not absolute

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report .  It's a synthesis of the latest scientific understandings of climate change, put together and carefully vetted by a group of several hundred climate scientists.   The news is not good. The earth has already warmed by 1.09 degrees Celsius on average.  Australia has warmed by 1.4.   Scientists are more certain than ever that it's caused by humans (us, and particularly the wealthy oligarchs who are blocking action).   They are also much more certain than they were last report about the direct link between climate change and natural disasters.  Remember those bushfires, and the ones sweeping Europe right now, right after the floods that swept Europe?  There'll be more. Sea levels are rising.  It's hard to say by how much because it's hard to model how major ice sheets will melt.  But higher than now.  Some Pacific nations are at risk of disappearing.   This is not t

Well friends, you'll be happy to know that the Great Barrier Reef has been saved.   Over the past few months our government has been pulling out the stops to prevent UNESCO from listing the Reef as 'In Danger'.  The Government's 'Ambassador for the Reef', Cairns MP Warren Entsch, took a bunch of foreign ambassadors on a tourist jaunt to some choice snorkeling spots.  Meanwhile the woman who holds the title of Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley, hopped on a RAAF jet with a bunch of advisors and visited capitals around the world, twisting the arms of the governments of the 21 countries on UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.  In the end, at least 11 countries voted to delay a decision for at least another year.  The list apparently includes Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mali, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and Spain. Minister Ley said : “Our concern was always that UNESCO had sought an immediate ‘in danger listing’

So, over the past few years the fight has been on over the Beetaloo Basin.  This piece of ground in the Northern Territory, home to the Gudanji, Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Jingili, Mudburra and Alawa nations for tens of thousands of years, has the misfortune to be the site of a massive gas-field.  Never mind that we are cooking the planet, and that the world is trying to grope its way towards reducing its emissions.  Our massive energy companies and their flunkies in our parliaments are determined to 'open up' these gas-fields to fracking.  The Commonwealth Government has so far subsidised this enterprise to the tune of close to $200m.  The traditional owners don't want it and have been opposing it for years.  They have succeeded in getting the Senate to mount an inquiry into the enterprise.   So I followed the prompting from the Australian Conservation Foundation and made a submission.  You can do the same if you like, just follow the prompts here .  Here's my submission - nothi

Well now.  I am at a loss to understand how it is considered OK in Australia to imprison people for eight years for arriving in the country without the right paperwork, when serious sex offenders can get two and a half years for abusing children.   A few months ago I wrote a letter to the (then) new Immigration Minister, Alex Hawke, asking him to give his attention to freeing the detainees who are being imprisoned in immigration detention in the Mantra Hotel at Kangaroo Point, at the inappropriately named Brisbane Immigration Transit Centre and elsewhere.  Strictly speaking I should have written to the Home Affairs Minister but since that was Peter Dutton I thought I would try Hawke. A couple of weeks ago I got a much-delayed reply from an official of the Home Affairs Department.  It was predictably appalling.  I was angry, and wrote a detailed response.  As fate would have it, we now have a new Home Affairs Minister, Karen Andrews, so I sent it to her asking her to do better than her