Painting Fakes

 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 ...

Over the past four decades the world's wealthy nations, including Australia, have been undertaking a vast social and economic experiment.  Whether you think this experiment has been a success, or a colossal failure, depends on how rich you are. This experiment is generally called 'neoliberalism' by progressive people like me.  More conservative people are more likely to call it 'free market economics' or the more fuzzy 'economic reform'.  The core idea that drives this experiment is that markets are the most potent and efficient way of organising production and consumption of both good and services. This has several implications for the way governments should act. They shouldn't compete with private sector entities, and should sell any government entities that do so.  Hence the wave of privatisations around the globe. They should keep their regulation of market activity to a minimum, as this interferes with the 'free' operation of markets. They s...

Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward.  He wrote three Trump books.  Fear  was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency.  Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.  The final book, Peril , cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure. Bod Woodward is a strangely appropriate person to be documenting the Trump and Biden years.  He became famous alongside Carl Bernstein in the early 1970s for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, back in the days when committing a criminal offence was eno...

( Content warning: this post discusses child sexual abuse and sexual assault.) I have to say I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the Australian of the Year award.  Often the person who receives it is someone I've never heard of, and as often as not I am none the wiser at the end of their term.  Theoretically they get to use their status to promote the work and issues which got them there in the first place.  The 2023 recipient is Taryn Brumfitt , the leader of the Body Image Movement which tries to counter the negative messages women and girls get through their lives about their bodies and build a more positive culture around our physical selves.  It sounds like a good thing, but I had to look that up just now for this article.  I was more familiar with her predecessor Dylan Alcott but I heard a lot less of him in 2022 when he was using his platform to promote disability inclusion than than I did in previous years when he was winning tennis tournaments....

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice....