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As Australian households grapple with soaring living costs and rising inflation, many are questioning the efficacy of the RBA's interest rate strategy, making the case for comprehensive government intervention to right the economic course.
As the National Council for Fire and Emergency Services updated Australia's fire danger ratings to include 'Catastrophic', it's worth considering other crises that pose a catastrophic threat like climate change, war, diseases, and economic loss, where disadvantaged groups disproportionately suffer.
The emptiness is dispelled as I pull into Broome, a frontier city located on Western Australia’s Kimberley coast. The city centre, currently undergoing a major revamp, buzzes with pedestrians. Restaurants require booking. Down on Cable Beach, cameleers are lining up their charges for sunset rides and road-trippers are driving onto the wet sand and setting up camping chairs and cracking beers as they settle in for the show of a lifetime.
It was summer in the midst of drought. The earth was parched, impenetrably hard, and all about leaves fell like rain, clogging gutters and the drains. Leaves fell in clouds, curled and dry, and formed a carpet across the street that crunched beneath pedestrians’ feet.
I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk
During Poson, a celebration of the entrance of Buddhism into Sri Lanka, I passed three tents presenting free sago, tea and jaggery. Though the fanfare of past years did not exist, it appears the country, though still damaged, is limping through to recovery. But can this recovery be sustained if the emotional pain is still to be unpacked?
How is it that with so few people 'on the ground', with sharp divisions among its spokespeople, and with the flight of PHON candidates, once elected, to continue to hold their seats as 'independents', the party may sneak into a position where, as Ashby and Dickson mused, they 'hold the balls of the government' in their sweaty little hands?
There are a few ways an individual can interact with a public space. The first is to sit in or walk through it while crunching an apple. The second is to inhabit it, grow an apple tree and share it with others. The third is to grow the tree, pick the apples behind your neighbours' backs and sell them to Woolworths for a profit.
Older people are among the most vulnerable pedestrian groups, and people over 85 are eight times more likely to be hit by a car in a car park, on a footpath or in a driveway than people aged 13-64. This is likely because they are less agile in terms of moving out of the path of a car — not because they're addicted to Pokemon Go.
Pinning all the blame for poor behaviour on deliberate individual choice is a fundamental attribution error. We need to rise above the salacious gossip and the spectacle of corporate beheadings to understand what drives behaviour in powerful people, take a more reasoned approach and achieve sustainable change.
The antecedents of Right-White Nationalism have, over three decades, entered mainstream Australian discourse. In Romper Stomper, it is represented by far-right group Patriot Blue, and a TV shock jock resembling those that Peter Dutton speaks to. But Romper Stomper doesn't pretend violence is the monopoly of the right.
These lone-wolf terrorists are more like miners' canaries. Whether it is a paranoid loner, an enraged ideologue, a jihadist or a white supremacist, they are screaming out at the top of their lungs that something is terribly wrong.