Is it time for Australia to acquire its own nuclear weapons?
Is it time for Australia to consider acquiring nuclear weapons? It sounds outrageous. Stay with me. Donald Trump is blowing up world trade. After a period of turmoil, it will probably settle into a new state where the US economy is substantially weaker. Trump is also trashing post-war alliances, including NATO, prompting US allies to decide America cannot […]
Trump & the climate
What seemed morally impossible has happened. So what does a second Trump Administration mean for global heating? Obviously, it will mean U.S. carbon emissions will be higher in 2030 and beyond than they otherwise would have been, and the world will become hotter as a result. Trump has said climate change is a ‘scam’, a […]
Should Peter Singer Be De-Platformed?
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 hear more, and she went […]
How do we prepare for life on a hot planet?
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 confront. It should be obvious […]
‘Neo-nature’ and the new world of the Anthropocene
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 events as a result of […]
It’s just not cricket: rich kids win at the expense of everyone else
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 the growing gap with public […]
Elite privilege isn’t a product of wealth Class shame is woven into the fabric of society
Almost a year ago, in July 2023, Rishi Sunak’s government named and shamed Britain’s most unruly towns. The media, unsurprisingly, lapped it up: places subjected to higher levels of social disadvantage were described as “bad towns” filled with “streets of shame”. All who lived there were tainted. We rarely think about what it means to […]
Magic thinking vs the hard truth of climate change
Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfeld Can Australia become a renewable energy superpower and help the world limit global warming? Across Australia, citizens rightly anxious about the changing climate are cautiously optimistic; after all, the alternative is grim. The federal government is building an economic strategy for the nation’s future around the idea, with Treasurer Jim […]
We’ve come a long way on gender diversity but what about class?
In 2021, the coach of the Perth-based West Coast Eagles Australian rules football team said recruits who attended public schools and came from single-parent families are too costly to manage off-field and the club might be better off concentrating on private school boys from stable families. His comments came a year after a Western Australian parliamentary inquiry found elite […]
How privileged school students avoided the Covid-19 lockdown
Clive Hamilton & Myra Hamilton In the game of privilege, we are all complicit. And if we are to write about privilege, we should declare our own. We have had many advantages in life. We are both white, well-educated and well-paid, and we hail from culturally, although not materially, rich families. One of us is […]