Painting Fakes

Way back when it was elected in 2022, Australia's Labor Government promised much needed reforms to Australia's environment laws.  These laws were delayed time and again, with the Nature Positive Bills only introduced into Parliament in late 2024.  If reports are correct, the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek reached a deal with the Greens to pass them with some amendments, only for the Prime Minister to pull the plug after some strategic lobbying from the WA Premier.  Perhaps he felt it was too close to the election and he didn't want to give the Opposition a stick to beat him with.   Anyway, finally we have a new bit of legislation in late 2025 and the new Minister, Senator Murray Watt, is suddenly in an awful hurry to have it pass.  Unfortunately it's not very good, but fortunately the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee is holding an inquiry into it and taking submissions.  Here is mine.  If you want to, you can ...

It's very possible that we could act quickly to limit climate change, and yet still end up making the world significantly worse.  The best way to ensure we do this is to let the worlds mega-wealthy - the 3,000 plus people who have wealth of over a billion dollars or, even worse, the 15 or so who own over $100b - to keep their wealth.   Cover of 'Cobalt Red' If you want to know why this is, read Siddharth Kara's book, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.   Published in 2023, the book is an investigation into the cobalt mining industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable batteries.  This means it is integral to the process of decarbonisation.  Mobile phones, laptops, electric vehicles, grid-scale 'big batteries' - every electrical device big and small uses cobalt.  The end users of this wonder metal are among the world's most recognisable and profitable global corporations - Sams...

I wrote some articles about degrowth ( here , here , here and here ).  I always meant to write more but I also have another project called Climate/Housing  and instead I wrote a series of articles there about extreme weather events .  Then I got distracted by other things, like getting repairs done on my house.  Now I'm back and here's what may or may not be the final post in my degrowth series.   Back when I started writing about degrowth I observed that the idea makes perfect sense, but that its advocates don't seem able to outline a political pathway towards it.  This is not to say that they are naive or disengaged - far from it. It is just such a fringe political idea at the moment that most people in politics and business (heavily intertwined in most societies including ours) simply ignore it.   I don't want to be a hypocrite and write a pithy series of posts that are similarly impractical.  I mean, at least Jason Hickel and Kohei ...

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...