Slumbering Green

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...

I live in Sydney and I don’t like to brag, but on 15 December – when QR code use in NSW was scrapped – I presciently tweeted the following: I don’t think we’ll have lockdowns again but QR code and mask use probably will stay .. Today it was announced that, in New South Wales, QR code use would return. It was also announced that, in Victoria, indoor mask use might be expanded. Mask use is already mandatory in Victorian shops and on public transport there (it’s mandatory on public transport in NSW). Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that, in South Africa, where the Omicron variant of Covid-19 first appeared, infections are declining after a short, sharp spike for about a month. It looks promising. Every day Australians are watching the news avidly as the main drama is playing out in our communities at large. We know how addicted to drama people are – news stories are written to encapsulate conflict in order to draw our eyes, and the number of OTT services serving up movie...