Painting Fakes

 Scott Morrison has finally left the Australian Parliament. "What?" I hear you say.  "Is he still there?" Indeed, for the past year and a half he has been lurking there in the back row, keeping out of the spotlight as much as possible.  Presumably he has been looking for the right job to move on to.  Is it churlish to suggest that offers were slow in coming?  That perhaps his time as Prime Minister did serious damage to his reputation? The recent ABC documentary, Nemesis,  displaying the entrails of the nine years of Liberal/National government, doesn't exactly make him more appealing.  His various colleagues and State counterparts range from diplomatic to scathing.  Some suggest he did a good job of the pandemic response.  Some of them talk about him as decisive, hard working, committed.  Yet he is also called a bully, a misogynist, a liar and a hypocrite.  The man himself sits through his long interview, leaning uncomfortably forward in his chair, with his cha

Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward.  He wrote three Trump books.  Fear  was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency.  Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.  The final book, Peril , cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure. Bod Woodward is a strangely appropriate person to be documenting the Trump and Biden years.  He became famous alongside Carl Bernstein in the early 1970s for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, back in the days when committing a criminal offence was enough to end so

There have been, and will be, plenty of post-mortems on the recent referendum, from people on all sides of the political fence, black and white.  A lot of those people will be more qualified than me to comment.  This statement from the First Nations leaders behind the 'yes' campaign is a 'must read'.  By comparison my thoughts carry little weight, but here goes anyway.... I come at this as a partisan.  I was active in the 'yes' campaign although far from central to it.  I went in the big march, joined with others to make a human 'yes' on a local football field, put up a 'yes' sign on the tree in front of my house, handed out flyers at the local train station, shared stuff on social media.  Most of this was done despite knowing it looked like a losing cause.  I didn't want to contribute to that loss with my own defeatist apathy.   There are lots of nuances to the explanation for the 'no' vote, and I think they all have some truth to t

 I'll be voting 'Yes' to the Voice.  I don't say you should, you should make up your own mind, but here are my own reasons for doing so, and my responses to the criticisms being made by its opponents. The basics of the Referendum on the Voice are set out here .  The vote will ask us to approve insertion of the following words into the Constitution. Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples 129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia: i. there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; ii. the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; iii. the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relatin

When I wrote a little post about trees earlier this year I was basically just talking through my hat.  What I know about trees would fit on the back of a postage stamp. However, I just read a book by someone who knows lots more about trees than I do, and he surprisingly confirmed what I was saying. The Forest Underground  by Tony Rinaudo has been heavily promoted in Christian circles and was named Australian Christian Book of the Year 2022 by Sparklit (the organisation which used to be known as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge).  Rinaudo also received a Right Livelihood Award (a kind of alternative Nobel Prize) in 2018 for his work on reforestation. In 1981 Tony, his wife Liz and their infant son headed off from Australia to join what was then known as the Sudan Interior Mission in Niger.  After a few months language learning and cultural orientation they took up management of a farm school and associated Bible College in the town of Maradi.   Along with his other respons

In his writings - both his award-winning novel/memoir No Friend but the Mountains and his journalism, recently collected and analysed in Freedom, only Freedom  - Behrooz Boochani talks about what he calls the 'Kyriarchal System'.  This term is his and Omid Tofighian's translation of the Farsi term system-e hakim.   Tofighian attempts to explain the term as follows: [it] can be translated in numerous ways ... sovereign system, controlling system, ruling system, governmental system, dominating system, oppressive system, subjugating system, ruling system ... but none of these actually capture the essence of what Behrouz is saying.... Wikipedia tells us: In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single