All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

This article (published on “The Conversation”) is a commentary on Adam Curtis’s three-part documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, which was braodcast on SBS TV in October-November 2011.

Women in combat and the death of feminism

“With women now to take on combat roles in the military it is time to sound The Last Post over the rotting corpse of feminism.” An opinion article published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2011.

Environmentalism: The Way Forward

A talk (by videolink) to the National Climate Action Summit University of Melbourne, 9 April 2011 The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled. Yet in the […]

Silencing the Scientists

Climate scientists have found themselves caught up in a hot political debate that they do not really understand or want to be part of, yet they have been the target of savvy, secretive and ruthless organisations ready to pounce on anything they said or wrote. This is the real story of “Climategate”. Instead, the scientists in question have […]

The recent controversy

Climate denial versus climate science A speech at the launch of Requiem for a Species Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, 24 March 2010 Clive Hamilton The attack on climate science in recent times has been orchestrated, relentless, and effective. Although it has reached fever pitch over the last six months, the campaign has been […]

The Rebirth of Nature and the Climate Crisis

The Rebirth of Nature and the Climate Crisis A Sydney Ideas Lecture University of Sydney, 7th July 2009 Clive Hamilton Introduction1 The failure of humanity to respond to the threat of global warming with anything like the urgency demanded by climate science is deeply puzzling. Undoubtedly, our preoccupation with economic growth, and the way it […]

The Time for Radical Activism

Speech at the Climate Action Summit Australian National University, 31 January 2009 Clive Hamilton It seems a long time ago that our new Prime Minister, the man who would sweep away 11 years of Howard Government denialism, went to Bali and declared to the world: Australia now stands ready to assume its responsibility … Climate […]

Climate Change and Its Implications for Australia

  Annual University Lecture at the Australian Defence Force Academy 10 September 2008 Clive Hamilton1 In 1956 a woman in Minneapolis began to receive communications from an extra-terrestrial being named Sananda. Marion Keech heard that a great flood would cleanse the world of earthlings at mid-night on 21 December. Only those who believed in Sananda […]

Reclaiming morality from conservative dogma and post-modern indifference

  Lecture in the Sydney Ideas series, University of Sydney, 12 August 2008 Clive Hamilton In the preface to The Freedom Paradox I say that I wrote the book to answer the question of why it is that, despite the wealth and freedom now enjoyed by most citizens of rich countries, we do not appear […]

Growth fetishism and public policy

A speech to senior executives of the Australian Public Service, organized by the Public Service Commission The Boat House, Canberra, 29 April 2008 Clive Hamilton1 In an oft-quoted speech Robert F. Kennedy said that GNP “measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to […]