Painting Fakes

The news of the day is that the Australian High Court has, for the second time, ruled the Commonwealth Government's funding of school chaplains unconstitutional.  This decision has come courtesy of a persistent Queensland litigant by the name of Ron Williams (pictured) who has objected to the placement of a chaplain employed by Scripture Union in his children's school. I have come across school chaplains in a few ways.  I have a good friend who is a chaplain (government-funded) at a rural school in the community where he is also the Anglican priest.  I have met and interviewed chaplains in the course of a project I worked on a few years ago about youth service delivery.  I also have a leadership role in a local church which employs two chaplains at Brisbane State High School, just across the road from us.  In this capacity I wrote the most recent application to have our permission to place chaplains in the school renewed, and helped negotiate the subsequent...

You're probably aware of the Law of the Conservation of Energy.  This is a law of physics which states that energy cannot be added to or removed from a closed system.  Energy can change its state or type - for instance, the chemical energy in dynamite can be changed into kinetic energy via an explosion - but overall the amount of energy will remain the same. You are probably not aware that there is a very similar law in public administration - the Law of the Conservation of Red Tape.  This states that red tape cannot be added to or removed from a system of government.  It can be converted from one portfolio or area of business to another, for instance by changes of law or changes of government, but it cannot be completely removed.  This means that when governments promise you that they will "cut red tape" what they actually mean is that they will cut red tape for some people while increasing it for others. Red tape is used in government departments to bin...

Well folks, there's been too much politics on this blog lately and not enough theology, so it's time to review a book I've just finished reading on Paul's letter to the Colossians. Oh, hang on a minute... The book's title, Colossians Remixed,  would not normally have got me in. Sounds dull, and Colossians is one of those books you tend to read quickly on your way between Romans and Hebrews. Still, the subtitle, Subverting the Empire,  was a bit more intriguing.  However, what really got me in were the authors. Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat are a couple from Toronto, where Walsh is a university chaplain and Keesmaat an adjunct professor of biblical studies.  A couple of years ago they did a speaking tour of Australia and although I didn't hear them I read the text of one of their presentations and found myself wanting more. The clincher, though, was Walsh's book Kicking at the Darkness , a theological reflection on the songs of Bruce Cockburn . Anyone w...

When my family became Australian citizens it was a very low-key affair.  Mum and Dad never had any interest in ceremony and were not particularly patriotic, so we skipped the public ceremony and took our pledge in the Brisbane office of the Immigration Department in the presence of an appropriately-ranking public servant.  At least, Mum, Dad and my sister did.  I was still under 16 and automatically became a citizen when my parents did. So I actually attended my first ever citizenship ceremony this week, supporting another relative.  It was an interesting event, because it emphasised just how much we are a nation of immigrants.  Brisbane's Deputy Mayor Adrian Schrinner, son of German immigrants, conducted the formal part of the ceremony.  Member for Brisbane Therese Gambaro, whose parents came from Italy, represented the Immigration Minister. These longer-standing immigrants welcomed new ones, proclaiming how happy they were that their parents had chos...

There's so much carnage in this week's Commonwealth Budget that small things are apt to slip by.  So I'm going to tell you about something from my professional life that has just become a casualty of Abbott and Hockey's slash and burn exercise.  It's a scheme called the National Rental Affordability Scheme. Back in 2004 National Shelter, the Community Housing Federation of Australia, the Australian Council of Social Services, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Housing Industry Association, supported by a wide range of other organisations with an interest in housing, convened a National Affordable Housing Summit.  It came up with a simple but ambitious plan of action aimed at improving Australia's housing system, and set up a working party under the leadership of Julian Disney to promote this plan around the country.  They were very successful, and large parts of their agenda were adopted by the Labor government on its election in 2007. One of ...

So now it's official, Joe Hockey's first budget is a shocker. His metaphorical language has taken a new turn.  Along with the task of "budget repair" we now now have the image of lifting.  Australians, he says, are "lifters not leaners" and this budget is about doing "heavy lifting" to get rid of government debt and move us back into surplus. It is highly debatable whether getting back into surplus is as important as Hockey wants us to think, but this morning I'm worried about less esoteric questions.  Like, who exactly is doing all this lifting?  Joe himself and his parliamentary colleagues are symbolically doing a little, accepting a 12-month pay freeze.  Meanwhile, 16,500 lower-ranking public servants will do a lot more, losing their jobs and having to look elsewhere, perhaps ending up doing real lifting as labourers on one of the many road building projects flagged in this budget. However, by far the heaviest lifting will be done b...

Tuesday will bring the unveiling of the first Abbott-Hockey budget, so I thought I'd prepare by reading the report of the National Commission of Audit .  What a sorry dog's breakfast it is! It's hardly a surprise that the report is a highly ideological affair.  Not only was it commissioned by an ideologically-driven government freshly elected to office, it is controlled by a hand-picked group of right-wing opinion-makers.  The Commission's chair, Tony Shepherd, was until recently President of the Business Council of Australia and its secretariat is headed by the Business Council's Director of Policy Peter Crone.  Other commissioners vary from politically committed right wingers to more moderate conservatives.  The commissioners are supported by a substantial team of officers from Treasury and Finance, but none from the operational departments whose programs they comment on with impunity. What did  surprise me was how careless and slipshod the whole t...

I'm always giving the Coalition a kick about various things, so it's time I got stuck into the Labor Party for a change.  Abbott, Hockey and co are for once on the right track and it's depressing to listen to their opponents' response. Budget emergencies are the height of political fashion at the moment.  Our current Queensland Government has been proclaiming one for the past two years.  It is a multi-purpose piece of rhetoric, allowing them to whack their opponents over the head, justify cuts to programs they don't like and soften us up for more quixotic asset sales.  Their colleagues over the border must think it's working because we now seem to also have one a Commonwealth level and the new Tasmanian Liberal Government has just announced one down there. The word "emergency" seems highly inappropriate to this context.  The credit ratings agencies don't seem too worried and the worst that has happened is governments going from AAA to AA+. ...

Earlier this year I spent a couple of days at Milmerran, a little town on Queensland's Darling Downs.  It has a population of a few hundred, surrounded by cattle farms and increasingly by CSG wells.  I was there for work, but I did get time to have a little walk around town (it didn't take long) and found this place. It's called Anzac Memorial Park, and it sits on Milmerran's main street, just out of the little strip of shops that passes for a town centre.  It's nothing that special - it has a few little bits of play equipment, a band rotunda, a public toilet, some nice trees and open lawns, a few benches here and there.  Pretty much like any park in any town or city in Australia. It also has this - a monument engraved with the names of all the local young men who lost their lives in the First World War.  Around the base has been added a second list of names, of those who died in the Second World War. This memorial is obviously well cared for. ...