Public ideas
Stan Grant on the big challenge
The planet is saved: the Albanese government has got a 43 percent emissions reduction through the House of Representatives and its passage through the Senate is virtually assured. Mission accomplished.
Bringing us back to our senses, Stan Grant has written a short essay Science has hastened and highlighted the perils of climate change, but it may not be the sole solution.
He repeats the warnings of Paul Ehrlich and Karen Armstrong about the terrible and unsustainable demands we are making on the planet’s resources, and our belief that with our technologies, we can defy nature’s forces:
Since the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, humanity has believed it is master of its fate. Nature was to be subdued. We wanted to get richer, live longer, and consume more.
But there was always a cost. Even as we thought we could delay the payment.
Quoting Armstrong he says we need to “recover the veneration of nature”.
Reflections on racism
How do some children become afraid of people of different “races”, while others do not, and how do they overcome those fears?
Without answering those questions conclusively, Gillian Bouras, writing in Eureka Street, reflects onexperiences in her own family – specifically a granddaughter who is learning how to navigate a multicultural, multicoloured, multiethnic world. The article has attracted some thoughtful comments.
Mates
Mention political corruption and the image that comes to many minds is a gift of cash in an Aldi bag in exchange for a councillor’s vote on a development proposal, or a place at an exclusive private school for a politician’s child in exchange for a government grant to the school’s building fund.
Such transactional corruption is all too common, but Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters, writing in The Conversation, warn of the pervasive and subtle presence of “grey” corruption: How mates and grey corruption rig the political game. It’s not about requited transactions; rather it is about the normal affections that develop between people who keep coming across one another in airline VIP lounges, clubs, and other social and professional circles. “Mates” in other words. It’s all legal, and there are no Aldi bags or coded emails: there don’t have to be. Such grey corruption is generally hard to pinpoint by any integrity agency.
The article is an introduction to their latest work Rigged: how networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians. It’s a sequel to their earlier work Game of mates: how favours bleed the nation.
The cost of such “grey” corruption is not just the lost opportunities for a fairer or lower-cost allocation of government contracts. It’s also about the complacency and institutional inertia when the same people are always making decisions that affect everybody’s lives. It’s a heavy and deadweight burden on our country.