Painting Fakes

Continuing my trawl through some of the books that have been waiting to be read for way too long....  Quite some time ago I bought a second-hand copy of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes,  probably at a Lifeline book sale.  I remember starting to read it, finding it dense to the point of incomprehensibility, and putting it on the shelf for later.  I'm not the only person who felt this - the book's previous owner covered the pages with underlining and illegible marginal comments for about the first third of the book, after which its pages are completely untouched. If this memory is accurate then I must have got smarter in the intervening years. His writing is not nearly as impenetrable as I remember it.  Not that it is exactly an easy read - he's a French intellectual, after all - but I found it clear, highly logical, and completely disconcerting.   Ellul was a prominent Christian intellectual in the second half of the 2...

One of the things I've been doing over the past few months is reading some of the books that have been sitting untouched on my shelves for a long time. A while ago, a friend passed on a copy of a book called Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views on Economics,  published by the evangelical publishing house Inter-Varsity Press back in 1984.  It had been sitting on her shelf for a long time, and has been sitting on mine for the past year or two.   Back on the 1980s IVP published a number of 'four views' titles, designed to present readers with some alternative Christian views on contentious subjects.  This one is edited by Robert G. Clouse, with contributions by Gary North, William E Deihl, Art Gish and John Gladwin.  Each contributor contributes a lead essay outlining their viewpoint on the topic - these are around 30 pages each - and then provides a brief response to the other three.  North is touted as representing 'Free Market Capitalism' , Deihl's...

A little after 8.00pm on Monday, 15 June, Noel Henry was riding his bicycle to his home in the Adelaide suburb of Kilburn when he was pulled over by the police.  They told him they suspected him of being in possession of drugs, and ordered him to put his hands on his head so they could search him.  According to the police statement released the next day, he 'originally was compliant and after a short time he began to refuse. Police attempted to arrest the man who resisted and a struggle ensued.'   The noise of this struggle alerted his friends who came out of the house.  Some of them filmed parts of the incident and subsequently posted their films on social media.  They show three police officers holding Henry on the ground, one of them hitting him, and his head being forcibly pushed down onto the concrete footing of the fence they have pinned him against.  All this while his friends yell at the police to 'get off his head' and 'let his head up'...

Here's some more social isolation reading for you.  As you may know, I've spent a lot of my career working on housing and homelessness.  I could write endlessly about policy and service responses (indeed, I have in other forums) but this is not the place for that.  Instead, here are two books that tell great homelessness stories. ***  A few years ago I read John Healy's The Grass Arena , his account of life as a homeless alcoholic in London. This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers.  It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read. Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants.  As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life.  He was an angry man.  As a teenager he took up boxing, feelin...

It would be hard to find someone who was more of a climate policy insider than Ross Garnaut.  After a varied career in government and academia including a stint as economic advisor to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Garnaut was asked by the Rudd Government to review climate policy soon after the 2007 election.  The result, completed in 2008, was the report which laid the groundwork for Rudd's emissions trading scheme which came within a whisker of being legislated before it was scuppered by Tony Abbott.  He was asked to revise and update this work in 2011 and this update provided the groundwork for the Clean Energy Futures Package which was legislated in 2012 and included a price on carbon. Last year Garnaut released a book,  Super-Power: Australia's low carbon opportunity,  which further updates his analysis and simplifies it a little for readers like me. You might think that after seeing his careful policy work trashed by fossil fuel industry stooges, Garnaut w...

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...