In the 1950s, Australians were constantly being told to be aware of the dangers of communist infiltration of our institutions. At the same time, DLP ads featured threatening arrows emerging from China and racing towards the heart of Australia.
Nineteen-fifties laws, including when we could drink, what we could do on Sundays and what we could read, had been shaped by 19th-century Christians. In 1959, there was also a Christian revivalist movement epitomised by the Billy Graham crusades.
Around the world statues are toppling, names of institutions are being changed and apologies for historic wrongs proffered.
But in Port Melbourne an ugly anomaly exists. It’s Princes Pier. The Pier is now a sort of pier its past length only obvious by rows of old wooden pylons which once supported most of the pier stretching out into Port Phillip Bay.
Two new surveys provide perspectives on who we trust, who we distrust and what communication channels we trust.
Trust in State governments and the Federal Government has declined in the past year according to a survey by the consultancy SenateSHJ as part of their Togetherness Index which looks at what communication elements contribute to social cohesion within the community.
Someone or other (not the blog) was taken by the recent Doing a Morrison blog post and its sort of Strine patois.
So much so that it has now been, if not immortalised, at least elevated to a place in the Urban Dictionary.
The Dictionary entry defines it (with suitable examples) as:
“A range of tactics for dodging your responsibilities, including (but not limited to): going missing when the going gets tough; passing the buck; and talking your way out of a tight spot with an empty promise.
Scott Morrison may be about to commit to net zero – but it’s going to be too little too late.
Other countries and Australia’s States have already realised we need to move on to bigger targets even earlier. NSW and Queensland aim to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030. Victoria aims to reduce emissions by 45-50% by 2030
G’day mate. Don’t you reckon Scott Morrison is a try hard with all that bullshit about how he’s really a true blue, fair dinkum Aussie?
He might be the boss cockie but he’s got Buckley’s of persuading us that he hasn’t made a dog’s breakfast of vaccines, JobKeeper and stacks of other things.
The Morrison Government may be dragging the chain on both measuring the social cost of carbon and acting on climate change but a global coalition of business people and academics has released a ground-breaking Real Carbon Price Index to track the progress the world is making towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Scott Morrison is probably like many fundamentalist Christians – picks and chooses the bits of the Bible that suit his religion.
His attitude to refugees is rather different from the Bible’s injunctions about neighbours but then he probably has a distinctive definition of neighbours which excludes refugees from countries we invaded, gays (he dodged the legalisation of marriage vote in Parliament) and climate change campaigners.
New forms of climate denialism focus on imagined costs and sadly not real costs.
Using cost-benefit analyses allows us to measure the cost of climate change through the calculation of the social cost of carbon (SCC) which puts a monetary value on climate change harms by adding up all the future damages from the emission of one tonne of carbon dioxide now.
Whenever there is a well-informed leak from Scott Morrison or his office there is always a purpose – normally tactical.
In this case, on the plane back from the US, someone told reporters that Morrison was re-considering going to Glasgow for COP26 in October.
Now there are a variety of possible explanations for the leak.