Painting Fakes

Catholics around the world, and many who are not Catholic, are mourning the death of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, following his death on Easter Sunday. Pope Francis was responsible for many firsts.  He was the first Pope from the Americas, and from the Southern Hemisphere.  He was also the first Pope to take the name Francis, after Francis of Assisi, famous for his devotion to the poor and his teaching that God's love encompasses the whole of Creation.  During his 12-year reign as Pope he tried to live out this example - living simply in the Vatican guest-house rather than the Papal Palace, washing the feet of prisoners on Palm Sunday, visiting and shining a light on what he called 'marginal places' where people struggled with poverty and oppression.  Much of his teaching reflected this priority. No one person can rule an institution with a billion members, not even one as hierarchical as the Catholic Church.  The church of which Francis took over l...

A couple of times in this series on degrowth I've talked about billionaires - about how economic growth is actually fueling increases in rich people's yacht money , not the basic needs of ordinary people, and about how our social fragmentation and the control of our media by similarly rich people means we are largely unaware of this fact and frightened to challenge the status quo for fear of losing our precarious security.  In this post I'd like to talk in a bit more detail about our billionaire problem. I consider myself wealthy.  After over four decades of professional careers and now in our 60s, Lois and I are debt free, own the house we live in and have a healthy superannuation balance.  We can look forward to a secure, comfortable retirement.  We are better off than 80% of the world's population. Now, we have simple tastes, we don't need a vast amount of money to live on.  I understand that some people have more expensive hobbies than we do - they want to ...

I promised to write some more about degrowth after kicking off with Jason Hickel and Kohei Saito .  Now it's the holidays and I have time, so here we go! It's easy for degrowth to seem like a fantasy, something a few idealists can write or talk about but that will never happen because politics.  Both Hickel and Saito made a good case for why degrowth is essential, but gave few pointers as to how we might get there.  I'm not sure how we can get there either, but over the course of a 'yet to be specified' number of posts I'm going to share a few ideas about how we could build a bridge between idea and reality. We are continually told by politicians and economists that economic growth is essential for our continued and improved wellbeing.  It's not immediately obvious why this should be so - if we already have all we need to live a good life, why do we need to keep getting richer?  The first clue to answering this question is to ask what our politicians and eco...

 In my last post I reviewed Mark Considine's assessment of the results of neoliberal policy reform in Australia's social services.  In each case, the results have been bad for service users and governments, who get poorer quality, more expensive services.  However, they have been very good for the entrepreneurs who get into this market, who have been able to get rich on government money. This is pretty much the story of the whole neoliberal project.  Ordinary punters are promised that if we reduce workers rights, the rights of indigenous people and pesky environmental regulations and provide government 'incentives' to business, this will turbo-charge economic growth and everyone will benefit.  Turns out that this isn't true.  Rich people keep on getting richer, while the rest of us stay about the same or even get poorer.  Meanwhile, we are crossing various ecological boundaries, threatening our futures in the name of 'economic growth' now. One answer ...

When I wrote a little post about trees earlier this year I was basically just talking through my hat.  What I know about trees would fit on the back of a postage stamp. However, I just read a book by someone who knows lots more about trees than I do, and he surprisingly confirmed what I was saying. The Forest Underground  by Tony Rinaudo has been heavily promoted in Christian circles and was named Australian Christian Book of the Year 2022 by Sparklit (the organisation which used to be known as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge).  Rinaudo also received a Right Livelihood Award (a kind of alternative Nobel Prize) in 2018 for his work on reforestation. In 1981 Tony, his wife Liz and their infant son headed off from Australia to join what was then known as the Sudan Interior Mission in Niger.  After a few months language learning and cultural orientation they took up management of a farm school and associated Bible College in the town of Maradi.  ...

Here's a little parable about plants.  In particular, a little row of street trees that I often walk past, just a few hundred metres from my home. I'm no botanist, but I believe these are Golden Penda trees, scientific name Xanthostemon chrysanthus.  They are Queensland natives but their natural range doesn't extend as far south as Brisbane. They are here because they were the official plant of Expo 88, planted in flower to provide visitors with a vibrant golden welcome.   The thing about these trees is that they love to grow.  What first attracted me to them was the way the foliage was starting to sprout from the base of the trees.  At the end of last autumn you could see that the growth was already strong. As I went out walking in the streets around my home I started watching the growth of these exuberant little sprouts.  Over a period of a few months last summer they went crazy, growing from modest little shoots to large new growths. Last summer was...