Painting Fakes

 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...

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the deat...

So, Donald Trump is gone.  At least, he's not President any more.  True to form, he didn't go quietly, and he keeps hinting he'll be back in 2024.  He could be in jail by then, or at least convicted of one of the many crimes for which he is currently being investigated.  But since he's so far been a Teflon man, I wouldn't like to count on it. Trump has raised untruthfulness to a pitch you would only ever expect to see in a totalitarian regime with a State-controlled media.  His daily storm of tweets, not to mention his speeches and press conferences, involved a steady stream of lies.  These are not a secret because the US has a free press which employs fact checkers.  The Washington Post has been keeping a tally and in October 2020 it passed 30,000 untrue statements for the four years of his presidency, an average of over 50 per day.  In one single day, on 11 August 2020, he made 189 untrue statements.   Some of these are trivial and si...

In her brief stint as the Independent Member for Wentworth, Dr Kerryn Phelps bequeathed the nation a gift, which has become known as the Medevac legislation.  A short explanation of this legislation is that when asylum seekers imprisoned on Manus Island and Nauru are sick in ways that cannot be treated there, the decision to evacuate them to Australia for treatment is made by a panel of doctors, not by Border Force officers with no medical training. Doesn't seem that controversial, does it?  They are not granted Australian residency.  They are not even released from detention.  They are simply moved from detention on a distant island to detention in Australia, close to the medical resources needed to treat their illness.  It's humane in a strictly limited, basically inhumane kind of way.  I think Phelps would have liked to do more, but this is the best she could get through with the help of Labor and her friends on the cross-benches.  Even then the L...

In 2019, the National Rugby League will be played without Johnathan Thurston for the first time since 2001.  Cue the obligatory memoir! The latter part of Thurston's 2018 season was somewhat surreal. His North Queensland Cowboys had a terrible year and were out of title contention by mid-season.  Thurston himself was playing like a man who may possibly have stretched his career one season too many.  If his career had finished with his final on-field act of 2017 - overcoming a busted shoulder to kick a classic curling conversion from the sideline and win Queensland the second State of Origin game - that would have a been a more fitting farewell.  Yet everywhere he went he was feted, with opposing teams presenting him farewell gifts after each game. His final act on the field, so to speak, was perhaps an appropriate sign-off for both the season and the career.  The match was an otherwise inconsequential game between the Cowboys and the equally struggling Gold ...

So, after eight years Barack Obama's presidency is over. Nothing on my Facebook feed is as polarised as the reaction to Obama's departure and the man who will replace him.  Some are mourning, others are celebrating.  Some are praising his graciousness and his lovely family, and dreaming of his wife Michelle launching her own candidacy in 2020.  Others are celebrating wildly, rejoicing that his destructive reign is finally over.  And that's just my Australian friends. I'm certainly not a fan of Donald Trump (I'll get to him in a moment) but I find it hard to join in the full-throated weeping for Obama. To my mind, Obama's presidency is summed up in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009.  At the time he had been President for less than a year.  The Nobel Prize Committee cited  'his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples', his 'vision of and work for a world without nuclear ...

Amidst last year's retirements of numerous high-profile Australian cricketers, not to mention today's announcement from West Indies great Shivnarine Chanderpaul, it would be easy to miss Nathan Hauritz's retirement anouncement. Hauritz could well have a productive second career as part of the answer to one of Australia's most difficult sports trivia questions: name the spin bowlers who have played Test cricket for Australia since Shane Warne's 2007 retirement. Any casual cricket watcher would get Nathan Lyon, who recently became Australia's most prolific Test offspinner.  Most would also get Stuart MacGill, the world class leg-spinner who spent his whole career in Warne's shadow.  How would you go with the rest?  Brad Hogg, Beau Casson, Cameron White, Jason Krezja, Bryce McGain, Xavier Doherty, Michael Beer, Steven Smith, Glenn Maxwell, Ashton Agar, Steven O'Keeffe.  And Nathan Hauritz. It is hardly a roll-call of glory.  Why is that a country whi...

So, it's kind of strange to find that once again our government has changed leaders. Not because it was a surprise.  Abbott has already been challenged once since he became Prime Minister, and put on notice that he needed to do better.  He didn't.  Rumours have been flying for weeks, Cabinet has been leaking like a sieve, polls have been plunging. What is surprising is that Malcolm Turnbull is prepared to take the job.  When Julia Gillard deposed Kevin Rudd in the midst of his first term it went really badly.  She couldn't criticise a government of which she had been part, nor claim it did a great job in the light of the fact she had deposed its leader.  She was left clinging to the rocks as the waves of negativity battered her from all sides. Why have our recent Prime Ministers (and indeed, Opposition Leaders) had such a short shelf-life?  One possibility is that politics these days is not a very attractive career choice, so we don't have the...