Painting Fakes

I'm not sure if I have the energy to blog about the upcoming Australian election.  The level of debate is so low, the options so dismal, that it is hard to know where to begin.  While the parties tit for tat about who will have the biggest deficit or break the most promises, everyone is ignoring the elephants in the room - climate change, the new world economic order, imprisoning asylum seekers, the permanent end to coal mining, a new generation of Aboriginal poverty and despair.  It's not so much an election as a game of trivial pursuit. Much like this heavily publicised book by Nikki Savva, The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government. Savva presents us with the inside story on the collapse of Abbott's Prime Ministership, as only someone in her position can.  She spent some years as Treasurer Peter Costello's press secretary before moving on to the Liberal Party's PR department, otherwise known as News Ltd.  She has a...

I've just read a most enlightening and thought-provoking book, Arrival City:How the Largest Migration in History is Changing our World  by Doug Saunders.  Saunders is an English journalist who writes for the Globe and Mail, the kind of journalist who looks beyond the headlines for the social trends and ideas that lie behind day to day events.  If I was journalist, that's the sort I'd like to be. Our world, he says, is going through the largest and most rapid process of urbanisation in human history. Millions of people in developing nations are leaving their villages and heading to the major cities, most of them never to return.  By the end of this century approximately two to three billion people - a third of the world's population - will have made the shift and most of the world will be as urbanised as the wealthy nations are now. At the centre of this movement is what Saunders calls the 'Arrival City' - those communities on the edge of major cities that ...

I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of David Kilcullen's Blood Year, and finally got to read it this week.  Kilcullen has been appearing a lot on ABC current affairs shows recently giving expert opinion on terrorist-related issues, and he always seems so knowledgeable and articulate. And so he ought.  Not only does he have a PhD in guerrilla warfare, he is a former Australian military officer who, during various phases of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, served as an analyst in the US State Department, an adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and on the staff of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  These days he runs a private research company which, among other things, advises humanitarian organisations about security issues in war zones and maintains a network of contacts in trouble spots around the world. The "blood year" of the title is 2014-15, when Islamic State emerged from the pack of extremist groups fighting in Iraq and Syria to claim large s...

So, over the past two weeks two Nauru-based asylum seekers have set themselves on fire.  The first, a young Iranian man called Omid Masoumali, died of his burns in a Brisbane hospital.  The second, a 21-year-old Somali woman named Hodan Yasin, set herself alight yesterday and is now in a critical condition.  Reports suggest at least one other man has been prevented from doing the same. As far as I understand this is the tip of the iceberg.  Depression, anger and self-harm are widespread amongst the asylum seekers on Nauru, Manus, Christmas Island and the various detention centres on the Australian mainland. Who is responsible for this shocking self-harm, these acts of desperation, these signs of hopelessness and despair? Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton wants us to believe it's the fault of human rights advocates, says the Brisbane Times  (which, by the way, is the source of the photo). He expressed anger at advocates and othe...

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant by the name of Muhammad Ali al-Samman found a stone jar buried on a mountainside near the town of Nag Hammadi.  Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus books. Over the next couple of years these books found their way, by various circuitous routes, into the collection of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities where in the decades that followed they were examined and translated by an international team of scholars.  The thirteen volumes brought together Coptic translations of over 50 second century Gnostic Christian texts, some completely unknown, some known only through quotes and references in other writings. This is one of the most important finds in the study of the origins of Christianity, opening up an avenue of understanding that had been closed for more than 1,500 years.  Elaine Pagels joined the team of scholars working on these documents in the late 1960s and has become one of the leading experts in the field.  She has wri...

I was in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and went for a walk through Pyrmont on the shore of Sydney Harbour - a very swanky location indeed, but fortunately most of the actual harbourside is public parkland. I noticed something strange, though.  A lot of the trees had been painted blue.  At least, their trunks and lower branches were painted blue up to the leaf line, where the blue merged into the natural brown of the wood and green of the leaves.  The effect was quite striking and a little disturbing, like they were ghost trees, or space aliens. The sign told me that this was the work of an artist called Konstantin Dimopoulos, global citizen and current Melbourne resident, and is "an environmental art installation that draws attention to global deforestation by turning living, breathing trees bright blue, demanding we notice them before the planet's old forests are gone for good."  It adds that Dimopoulos has installed similar works around the world. Now I fin...

So, it appears that after six months as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull has finally done something clever.  He has presented the minor parties in the Senate with an impossible dilemma: vote in favour of a pernicious union-bashing piece of legislation, or be sent to a double-dissolution election on July 2 in which the most likely outcome is that most of them will be wiped out of the Senate courtesy of new voting rules designed for this very purpose.  For good measure, he will be hoping that the prospect of what is essentially a three-month election campaign will silence his increasingly vocal enemies in the right wing of his own party. So at least a partial win for Turnbull whichever way it goes, but a sad and difficult time for us voters. We are facing the biggest double disillusion election in my almost forty years on the electoral roll.   Back in 2007 when we were disillusioned with the long-running Howard Coalition government we could turn to Labor under that...