At the Byron Writers Festival last week, I overheard a conversation between two writers in the shuttle bus. “I’m going to the Peter Singer session ,” said one. The other, an Indigenous woman, replied, with some bitterness: “I’ve no interest in listening to him, he’s a eugenicist.” I turned to...

There has always been a sense of unreality about our climate change predicament, especially through the long years of denial, disputation and delay. More recently, Australia seems to have jumped from the delusions of denial to faith in increasingly implausible”solutions”, bypassing sober assessment of the seriousness of the reality we...

Do you, like me, hesitate when you refer to floods or bushfires as natural disasters? When Earth’s atmosphere is warmer and moister because of human-induced climate change, all weather events have a human fingerprint. The now well-developed field of ‘attribution studies’ calculates the increased likelihood and severity of extreme weather...

The opening on Friday of Radford College’s multi-million dollar cricket facility—described as ‘better than Lords’—draws attention to the fundamental unfairness of our education system. Elite private schools are engaged in a kind of arms race to build the most lavish facilities for their already privileged pupils, which not only highlights...