Opinion
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
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
‘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
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
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
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
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Mr Albanese is welcoming this as great news and implicitly a victory for his diplomacy. But the ban was a piece of Beijing’s economic blackmail and punishment. Albanese should say “It’s about time China stopped its outrageous behaviour.”
"The student movement of the late 1960s was among other things a prophetic critique of today’s brutally philistine universities, self-avowed service stations for the capitalist economy."
Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, 10 October 2024 edition
More scams. Hey people, stop being greedy. Just put your savings into a good super fund and forget about it. https://amp.abc.net.au/article/104346234
Another example of what we describe in our book, The Privileged Few @CliveCHamilton
"The gap between sporting facilities available to children from families of modest means and those from wealthy families is widening..."