Latest Updates
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Re-engaging
Well, I’m back! As you may recall, I stepped down as Executive Director of the Green Institute back in March in order to focus fully on my election campaign for the seat of Canberra. The board kindly kept my position vacant for the duration, while the wonderful Elissa Jenkins very ably held the fort, and…
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Talking About Being Decent To Each Other – Paths To A UBI
When it comes down it, the barest minimum we should all be able to expect in a decent society is to be treated with basic decency, right? A roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and a little cushion to buffer against hard times. It seems extraordinary that so many people, even in Australia…
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Review: Anna Krien’s ‘The Long Goodbye’
Coral reefs are extraordinarily beautiful, diverse, complex ecosystems. It is their diversity and complexity, in no small part, which gives them their beauty – colour and movement, ever changing, ever shifting, something to take your breath away everywhere you turn. It is, of course, that diversity, and the complexity of interplays and connection, which gives…
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Liberté, Égalité, ‘Facebookité’
Today is Bastille Day, the anniversary of a pivotal moment in world history: the storming of the Bastille, marking the beginning of the victory of the French Revolution, and a key point in global democratisation. I wonder, is the democratisation of Facebook one of the crucial next steps towards global democracy? This might sound flippant…
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Brindabella Views Or Billboards? You Choose.
You know what Canberra, our beautiful bush capital, needs? More billboard advertising! Said nobody, ever… … Except Andrew Barr, in a brief thought bubble early this year. Unfortunately, our Chief Minister sent the idea off to a Legislative Committee inquiry and, unless a large number of Canberrans write in urgently to say it’s the last…
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Macdonald Is The Tip Of The Coal Corruption Iceberg
It’s remarkable how often corruption in Australian politics is linked to coal. The jailing of former NSW Resources Minister, Ian Macdonald, last week is the tip of the iceberg. It’s just the most recent in a line of explicit and proven corruption directly linked to the coal industry. But the corruption goes far deeper than…
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Advertising and the budget: the $5 billion tax break that makes us unhappy
This was first published at Independent Australia. They say, with Budgets, the devil is in the detail, and it takes weeks to find. But there’s one huge tax break which we won’t find as we’re poring over the papers – because it isn’t mentioned. The long-standing but completely ignored 100% tax break for expenditure on…
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Thoughts On Returning Home From Global Greens 2017 / Wot i did on my holidayz
The 2017 Global Greens Congress in Liverpool was inspiring and energising from start to finish, with discussions of big ideas, opportunities to link up with people from all over the world, and sharing of skills and experiences in every direction. What I brought home from the Congress, above all, was a feeling of how extraordinarily…
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A Budget For Last Century…
Last night’s Budget has been received by many as a typically Labor Budget. And, to be frank, that’s about right. Publicly framed as fair while hiding tax cuts for big corporations and nasty punitive measures for vulnerable people, it’s a Budget that suits a party still emerging from the 19th century, paying no heed to…
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Report from Universal Basic Income session at Global Greens Congress, Liverpool, England
I chaired a tremendously exciting and invigorating session on Universal Basic Income at the Global Greens Congress yesterday, with panellists Barb Jacobson, Chair of Basic Income Europe, June Cho from the Green Transformation Institute of Korea, and Swedish MP and government minister, Janine Alm Ericsson. Around 100 people from Europe, the Americas and Asia gathered to…
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Fairness To Fascism: Trump’s Bait And Switch
Thoughts following Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. “Forgotten men and women”. “Struggling families”. “Mothers and children trapped in poverty”, not “sharing the wealth” of “the establishment”. On one reading, Donald Trump’s inauguration speech is full of left wing imagery and ideas. So much so that some left wing people, on Facebook at least, have suggested that…
