Painting Fakes

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. ...

It's Good Friday in two days, the day we commemorate Jesus' death.  At St Andrew's South Brisbane each year we have a series of meditations, and I'm responsible for one of them this year.  This meditation brings together three things.  The first is the chosen reading, from Matthew 26:46-68, which includes Jesus’ arrest in the garden and his sham trial before the High Priest Caiaphas. The second is the framework for this year's series, “Jesus the real King”.  In what sense is it possible to see Jesus as a king when he is so obviously powerless? The third is the religious thought of Leo Tolstoy .  Later in his life, after he had written his great novels, Tolstoy experienced a profound conversion.  He came to understand that following Jesus meant obeying his command to love our neighbours as ourselves, to do to others what we want them to do to us.  If we take this seriously, he says, we will not try to kill one another in war, we will not ...