Slumbering Green

Why wasn’t I surprised when an ex-school principal took part in a military-style exercise shooting and killing three people? Guns have always been a part of the frontier. Queensland is still a frontier state. Don’t talk to me about the driving, the unwillingness to use vehicle indicators to signal when your car is going to turn, the high-speed pursuit-like behaviour on the Bruce Highway north of Brisbane, the tendency of people living in the north of the state (a state which is the size of Alaska) to refer to people living in the southeast as “Mexicans”. Julian Assange grew up in the north, he wrote the book on distrusting the authorities, and is still languishing in prison because of his radical ideas. Queensland has a frontier problem. Nathaniel Train might’ve worked in NSW but it was a remote part of that state, and it was just a short distance across the border in Queensland where he found his apotheosis, the solution to all his problems, and of the problem of living alongside othe...

When the Chinese government said that the relationship with Australia should be “cherished” I immediately thought about Gough Whitlam’s visit to Beijing in the 70s. No media have pointed out the connection but this is not surprising as I’m quite old, older than most practicing mainstream journalists, and my referents are naturally different. I belong to a generation that is fast fading into obscurity, a kind of elder. But as the traditional welcome to country that presages most public gatherings tells us we should at least pay our respects to elders even if we don’t do what they say. China doesn’t have a functioning public sphere, although WeChat does some work in this respect, and so it needs countries like Australia to fill the gap where corruption and unhappiness reside in its extensive population. We need to remember what our predecessors have done as their example can help us to navigate the rocky passes of the present. Gough Whitlam’s momentous visit is significant because it cam...

Since QE2 passed away I’ve been watching the telecasts of the news with a kind of dread. One black suit, black tie, black dress after another seated at a desk where the conventions of royalty are pored over with the same concentration and enthusiasm as a panel of football experts discussing the relative severity of a crash tackle. Will the player be sent off? If he isn’t and he scores a try has the referee inexcusably skewed the game’s outcome?  We love the minutiae of sport just as we love being the first person in the Twitter feed to expound on the origins of the name “Hansard” or to explain why the new House Speaker pretends to go resisting to the chair at the front of the room. QE2’s sudden demise has powered our love of rules into an obsession and we wonder at the Proclamation, gape like schoolchildren at the King gritting his teeth in frustration when a tray of pens gets in his way as he’s signing some arcane document – you mean you still don’t know? – and watch enraptured as...

Scott Morrison’s premiership will be remembered for the way that this week has played out but I think that the reaction is over-the-top, and could be harmful. Leave aside questions of mental health (we’ve seen with the treatment of John Barilaro in New South Wales that Twitter doesn’t really care about “people” per se) the frightful and predictable dealing by the prime minister just shows how hidebound and fearful the Labor Party really is. If you criticise as illegal something that was just unconventional you basically short-circuit imagination in government, and if our era needs something is certainly needs politicians to think outside the box. The old “left” vs “right” paradigm that Anthony Albanese grew up worshipping is not very useful in an era when polarisation can take such extreme forms as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Trump attempt to take the Capitol by force in order to reverse the election result of 2020. We need politicians who are willing to do things that are unc...

The assassination of Shinzo Abe in Japan by a man evidently with a mental illness does raise questions on a number of fronts. It’s worthwhile looking at the tone of public conversations even in countries like Australia which doesn’t have a history of violence against elected representatives. Egging is commonplace enough not to need explanation, however, and it’s just a step up in the level of violence to get to shooting. Guns being more accessible in Australia than in Japan it’s not hard to see how this might happen, so Karen Andrews, a Coalition politician, is right in expressing concern on this account. The other problem that needs addressing is that Japan largely ignores mental health in its conversations about itself. More awareness in this regard might’ve prevented the accused from making his weapon and plotting Abe’s demise. Mental illness is unfortunately endemic in Japan and the burden on families is even larger than it is in Australia because people feel so much shame. It’s go...

A report into sexual harassment in the Western Australia mining industry highlights the corrosive nature of corporate life in a stark way. If women were being bothered by unwanted advances, if the comments coming from their male coworkers were so awkward, if they felt like they had to wear baggy clothing just to survive the workplace, where were the human resources departments?  What were HR managers doing? Did they have no idea? Were no complaints at all about fly-in-fly-out employees on mine sites registered in their books? It’s very hard to believe that some idea of the problem wasn’t talked about among HR staff. What about sharing this data with colleagues at other companies? If you have dedicated HR staff whose job it is to find out about misbehaviour in the workplace and to deal with it in a professional manner, then the system evidently failed in a catastrophic manner. A public outcry, an official government report, all of these things must lead to culture change, but I thi...

On the first day of trading after the federal election the markets went up slightly and some on Twitter were crowing but in fact share traders are only waiting to see the full constitution of the Senate and House of Reps to know which way to price stocks. The Albanese government is on probation, and it remains to be seen how much influence the Greens will have in Canberra.  If they control the balance of power expect to see market falls as traders price in the cost of new taxes and burdens on corporations imposed by the ideologically-driven Greens. While watching the news I noted Adam Bandt listing “inequality” alongside climate change as a priority for his party. I read a history of the Greens not too long ago (it was a couple of years back) and the red tinge of the watermelon party is stronger in some states than in others but it’s present everywhere. The spectre of revanchism offers people living in the community an opportunity to mobilise dark forces. We see it in some countrie...

The furore surrounding the candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, is a symptom of the problem facing conservative parties globally. As participation in political mechanisms such as parties drops, and as social media fills the void subsequently left open for exploitation, you see radical ideas being shared and weaponised for political ends. This has been apparent for some time, and what happened to the Liberal Party this election – 2022 is important for many reasons but especially for the fate of the Labor Party – is symptomatic of changes that are reshaping the way that we govern ourselves. 15 years ago Twitter was full of enthusiastic ponderings on the role of IT in politics, but now most people seem to regret how it has changed the tone of debate. Some who have benefited from the popularity of popularism dig in their heels and wear the condemnatory epithets of journalists with pride (sewer rat, for example). Others, who have felt the sting of partisanship go the other way and leav...

I was absolutely stunned to find this morning that the editors at this prestigious motoring magazine had awarded their top prize to a car that doesn’t offer a low-emissions option.  What madness. In 2022, and when take-up of electric vehicles in Australia is still vanishingly low, the idea of rewarding a manufacturing company on account of a diesel-powered automobile almost knocked my socks off. Not literally – to get my socks off my feet in any way other than the routine method would require high explosives – but at least rhetorically. Words matter, and the decisions we make every day affect the climate, whether we choose to go on holidays overseas (using tons of fuel that has to be burnt to get our conveyance through the air) or at home on a sleeper train, or whether we elect to walk down the road to do our shopping locally at the strip mall or else at a more distant shopping centre that we must use the car to get to. ‘Drive’ editors making the wrong choice just shows how tone-de...

Now that the rules around testing in some states have changed the number of cases will have to figure less in our conversations about Covid. Removing the requirement to get a pathology lab test done once a quick home test comes back positive means reporting is now different from in the past. The key indices now are hospitalisations and the number of people in intensive care wards. Even if New South Wales introduces a quick method to register a case using a mobile phone it’s inevitable that some cases won't now get reported so as the public continues to register a sense of panic by staying at home at levels not seen since the Delta outbreak the assurance it wants will remain out of reach unless we change our collective understanding of the figures. Governments need the media in order to process the messaging it has to perform in order to make sure laws and regulations are taken on-board. What they say affects what we think, and what we think changes what we do. It’s important for th...