Painting Fakes

So, after months of deadlock and confusion, the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers has provided Julia Gillard and Chris Evans with the fig-leaf they need to adopt large parts of the Coalition's policy on unauthorised boat arrivals. Of course the answer you get from an expert panel will depend very much on the question you ask.  This one was asked a number of questions, but the two pertinent ones were as follows. "....how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat;" and "...the development of an inter-related set of proposals in support of asylum seeker issues, given Australia’s right to maintain its borders ;"  (with my italics) Their answer is that if you want to stop people coming to Australia by boat, you need to ensure that they get no benefit from doing so.  To acheive this the panel has made 22 recommendations.  The key ones for immediate implementation are: re-opening the detention centres on Nauru and

With the London Olympics winding to their close, it's hard to think anyone can have missed hearing about the woes of Aussie 100m freestyle swimmer James Magnussen and his team-mates, or missed out on seeing the Commonwealth Bank advertisement featuring his hopeful smiling face.  For those who forgot, the ad (which interestingly is now unavailable on the internet) features Magnussen out for a training run, followed by guys wearing the letters "C", "A" and "N".  They start talking him up: "Not long till you bring home gold for Australia." "Hope so," says Magnussen. "Know so!" Then a guy in a "T" joins them and starts to cast doubt on the expected gold medal.  "After all, it's not like you haven't been beaten before."  The ad ends with the "T" bloke tripping over the edge of a cliff and landing in the ocean below. Fortunately for our sometimes tenuous link with reality, Mag

I have suggested that Jesus' miracles are not so much displays of power  as teaching events coded to the worldview of first century Palestine .  If this is the case, what is Jesus teaching through them? In one sense it is not really possible to answer this question, at least not in a blog post although perhaps in a hefty tome.  Each incident has its own meaning, its own message.  Jesus spoke on many subjects and responded to many different people.  Yet much of his message is organised around the central theme of the Kingdom of God or as Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. Right from the the beginning Matthew has him saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near".  Jesus is not a systematic theologian, and he never defines or describes in an orderly way what he means by this term.  Instead he illustrates it in multiple parables, and enacts it in various deeds miraculous and otherwise. So here are some key things I think Jesus' deeds show us about the Kin

I'm not sure how I've managed to get through more than 250 posts on this blog without raving about Ian McDonald .  McDonald is a British science fiction writer based in Belfast in Northern Ireland, but his writing reveals a true world citizen. I've previously commented how much better current speculative fiction writers are than their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s.  Of course there's still plenty of trash, but the sprawling space operas of Iain M Banks and the taut, adventurous cyberpunk of William Gibson are as good as any literary writing you will read.  McDonald is the equal of these and perhaps even superior to them.  He has a lot more in common with Gibson than Banks, his writing set in the near future, and his settings defined by where our current technologies might take us within our own lifetimes.  Yet where Gibson's novels are almost claustrophobic with their small casts of characters, secret rooms and secretive plots, McDonald's palette is

In my first post on Jesus' miracles I summarised my reasons for not seeing the miracles as demonstrations of power, and in the second I commented on the way the miracle stories are bound by the culture and world view of their original authors and hearers.  The starting point for this one is the theory of some New Testament scholars that among the original sources for the gospels were a "sayings gospel" and a "signs gospel".  If they existed (and their existence is merely an hypothesis, no copies exist), then the first was a collection of the sayings or teachings of Jesus, and the second of deeds attributed to him.  Within this framework, Jesus' acts are not defined by whether or not they require supernatural power, but simply by the fact that he did them. No doubt Jesus did many things - getting dressed, washing his hair, going to the toilet, ordinary everyday things of which we have no record because they were not worth recording.  The deeds we have i

I mentioned previously that I am very skeptical about the Queensland Government's supposed budget crisis .  I believe it has been greatly exaggerated by the Newman LNP Government as an overarching story to justify cuts which are essentially ideological.  Recent events in the housing portfolio, dear to my own heart, have confirmed this suspicion.  New housing minister Bruce Flegg, who has no history of involvement in housing issues, started his tenure by announcing that (shock! horror!) Queensland's public housing system is losing $2m per week, and is struggling to cope with the demand for housing from low income tenants.  He proceeded to float a number of ideas for "improving" the system, most of which involved moving tenants on from their housing in some form.  He advocated alternatives including shorter leases, compulsory transfers and asking single tenants in large housing to share if they are not willing to move. Then this week he has announced, without warning,

The management of News Ltd's flagship The Australian assures us that they don't have a political agenda, they just report the news as they see it.  If that's the case, then they see things in a slightly odd way.  Or perhaps it's better to say they see some things, but not others. For the past two Saturdays The Weekend Australian has featured pretty much identical cover stories about the refugee issue.  Yesterday's was entitled Too Poor for a Boat, Family Stuck in Asylum Void , and features the story of Burmese Chin refugee Ngun Tin Tial and her family, stuck in Kuala Lumpur after fleeing persecution in their homeland and living in legal limbo, earning a meagre living in the grey economy.  They would like to come to Australia and have got some way along the application process.  However, the wait is long, and apparently being made longer by the fact that when Australia accepts boat arrivals, these are counted towards our overall refugee and humanitatian quota of