Painting Fakes

So after all my letters to our esteemed Prime Minister I've been neglecting his State colleagues here in Queensland.  Of course, they are making a better fist of climate policy than Scomo and his mob, but that's not saying much.  So I thought that in this new era of Commonwealth/State cooperation (and with an eye to our State election which is just around the corner) I would adapt my latest missive for the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk. Dear Premier I trust you and your family and loved ones are well and thriving through the COVID crisis.   I would like to thank and congratulate you and your government, along with your State and Commonwealth colleagues, on your astute handling of this crisis.   It’s been reassuring to see the speed and effectiveness with which our governments have reacted, and the success this has brought about in keeping the number of infections low.   No doubt there is a long way to go and there will be twists an...

So it's been a few months and last week was the Student Climate Strike, staged online as everything is at the moment.  I admire those kids for their persistence to keep going when it seems doubly hopeless, so decided it was time for my next letter to our esteemed Prime Minister.  Here it is for your reading pleasure.  Others have said similar things, not really my idea, but the more of us say it the more they have to listen. Dear Prime Minister I trust you and your family are well and thriving through the COVID crisis. I would like to thank and congratulate you and your government, and our State governments, on your astute handling of the crisis.   It’s been reassuring to see the speed and effectiveness with which our governments have reacted, and the success this has brought about in keeping the number of infections low.   No doubt there is a long way to go and there will be twists and turns along the way, but so far so good. To me, your...

I once tried to write a novel and I tell you, it's not as easy as it seems.  Mine was terrible.  I gave it to a couple of trusted friends to read, they kindly damned it with faint praise, and that was that. In the meantime of course I do enjoy good novels that other people write, and I often find myself drawn to where they began.  Perhaps its my parents' fault.  One of my favourites among my dad's science fiction books was an anthology called First Flight: Maiden Voyages in Space and Time  which contained the impressive first published short stories of some of the luminaries of post-war science fiction, including such names as Robert Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C Clarke and AE Van Vogt.  I know this because I still have it on my shelf. Later on my mother gave me a lovely coffee-table book (which I also still have) called First Glance: Childhood Creations of the Famous.  This drew its net far wider, including such curiosities a...

Last year I paid a lightning visit to Adelaide for work.  Normally if I go to Adelaide it's to visit family and the visit consists of lots of cups of coffee with hospitable rels, but this time I was there for such a short time that I didn't tell anyone.  After I had finished work I went for a stroll around inner Adelaide, through the university, along the Torrens River and ended up in the Rundle Mall, drawn as if by a magical force towards a bookshop that was having a closing down sale.  There I laid out two dollars for a copy of Henri Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate,  which is quite possibly the best two dollars I have spent for a long time. The front page of this edition says: " The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) was published in 1913, the year before Henri Alain-Fournier was killed on the Western Front."  He was just 28 when he died, and this was his only published novel. Its French title is simply drawn from the name of its central character, Augustin ...

Apparently, Australians are in the grip of toilet paper panic.  Supermarkets all around Australia have had their toilet paper aisles cleaned out as shoppers load up whole shopping trollies full of jumbo packs.  Poor pensioners who can only afford to buy a few rolls at a time are getting there too late, or worrying that the aisles won't get re-stocked in time.  And it's not just in Australia.  Our friends over the ditch in New Zealand, and over the sea in the US and UK, are also wiping out toilet paper supplies. We all know it's about COVID-19 and the possibility of widespread self-quarantining, but why toilet paper?  How much toilet paper do you need to get through a 14-day quarantine period?  While some Australians are stocking up, others are laughing at them, or scratching their heads at the stupidity of it all.  I think the main reason they are confused is because they have not yet seen my World Diagram™ on the subject.  Now is your, and the...

Climate change is a toxic process for our (or God's) planet, and is also a toxic subject in Australian politics which has brought down, at last count, three Prime Ministers.  No aspect of climate change policy is more toxic than the idea of a carbon price. Most economists will tell you that if you want to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in a capitalist economy, the most efficient tool in our policy toolbox is a price mechanism.  While the details of such mechanisms are complex and varied the concept is simple - companies that emit greenhouse gases (CO2, methane etc) need to pay a price for every tonne they emit.  This price will give them an incentive to reduce their emissions, and provide an advantage for no- or low-emissions technologies to be developed and deployed. As with so many things economists see as obvious, there are many reasons why this is not as easy as it sounds.  Chief among them is the fact that companies which emit greenhouse gases don't...

I've just finished reading Simon Reid-Henry's Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017.   Because I could.  It's quite a tome and I read each of its three parts separately with a bit of time in between reading something a bit lighter. Reid-Henry teaches history, political economy and international law at the University of London as well as being Senior Researcher at the Oslo Peace Research Institute.  I'm super-impressed by people who can write books like this.  You would have to read and catalogue an almost unimaginable number of sources - the end-notes alone cover 87 pages - and then somehow make sense of all those little pieces of data to try and tell a coherent story.  I'm convinced that history writing is a kind of conjuring trick, but without historians we would have to do all that fact-checking ourselves, or just rely on our memories.  All the events he covers in this book took place in my lifetime, but there's pl...