Indigenous

Jan 25 2016

1

What is Australia Day for?

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Education, History, Indigenous, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 41 Comments

As Australia Day approached I kept getting new messages about what it was about. One was that it would cause the largest number of claimed ‘sickies’ every recorded by Australian employers on Monday, because the holiday fell on Tuesday. Another was that I would show myself as a true Australian by having a barbecue in the backyard, having bought the right tools from a hardware store. Another said I should be eating lamb on Australia Day. Yet another, from Adam Gilchrist, a former Australian of the Year, was that I could do almost anything (I think), as long as I stopped…

Jun 29 2015

0

The ABC in deepest, darkest doo-doo land

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Health, History, Indigenous, Language, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 30 Comments

I’ve twice watched the Q&A section on Zaky Mallah, and can’t come to quite the same level of indignation as our Prime Minister. But two things stand out. First, the Q&A host fed a question to him designed to provoke or embarrass the Government representative on the panel (who I thought did very well), and second, after that Mr Mallah was uncontrollable. Mr Mallah was not a great choice by the ABC for whatever role he had to play. At best he is a muddled, mixed-up young man who has a great deal of growing up to do. He did spend…

Dec 19 2014

0

The last essay for this year

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Food & Wine, Health, History, Humour, Indigenous, Language, Media, Music, Other, Politics, Religion, Research, Road Safety, Society, Sport, Theatre | 26 Comments

Even websites need a holiday, and mine starts tomorrow. I’m back at work in the week beginning 12 January, and wish all my readers a relaxing, safe and enjoyable holiday break too. I started this website in June 2012, so it is now two-and-a-half years old. Over that time it has attracted about 27,000 unique readers, who have in total visited the site more than 70,000 times, and read nearly 150,000 pages. Readers have made nearly 3,700 comments to my 608 posts, and of course to one another’s comments. Before I get carried away with such success, I should mention that my…

Aug 08 2014

0

On ‘homelessness’

By Don Aitkin | Economy, Education, Environment, Health, History, Indigenous, Media, Politics, Society | 11 Comments

When I was young, housing was in short supply, and some of my classmates at high school boarded with friends of their parents, or with relatives, so that they could be close to school. There were quite a few hostels, too, for kids from far away. Young couples waited to marry when they could get somewhere to live, or lived with in-laws, not an ideal option. The depression of the 1930s and the second world war had reduced domestic house-construction to nearly zero, and it took a decade before the necessary materials were available again. But I don’t remember ‘homelessness’…

May 19 2014

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Inequality and poverty

By Don Aitkin | Economy, Education, Health, History, Indigenous, Language, Media, Politics, Society | 38 Comments

We will have budget talk for another week, and then attention will shift to the new Senate and negotiations between the Coalition and the minor parties in the new Senate. But throughout the past week there has been a lot of talk and a lot of complaint about the ‘inequality’ said to be part of the Treasurer’s approach to the deficit. Who really is doing the ‘heavy lifting’? I wrote a piece about the improvements in the level of poverty in the world some time ago, and said in it that inequality and poverty are not the same thing at…

Apr 28 2014

0

Free Speech

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Education, Environment, Health, History, Indigenous, Language, Media, Politics, Society | 26 Comments

Many years ago I came across A. P. Herbert’s Misleading Cases, a collection of legal spoofs written by Herbert and originally published in Punch. Most concerned a litigious chap called Albert Haddock, who took offence at pretty well anything to do with the Government of the day, and essayed into court to have his say. The judges all had outlandish names, and one of them gave an opinion as follows: the only right of the subject in a public street is to pass at an even pace from one end of it to another, breathing unobtrusively through the nose and attracting no…

Jan 31 2014

0

On poverty, in the past, and in the future

By Don Aitkin | Economy, Education, Environment, Health, History, Indigenous, Media, Politics, Research, Society | 6 Comments

Bill Gates, he of great wealth, and the classic leader of the world’s English-speaking A-list, has a foundation which he and his wife run. It puts out an annual letter, which came my way a little while ago, and started with a quite up-beat statement about poverty. It went like this: By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how…

Jan 27 2014

0

Another Australia Day

By Don Aitkin | History, Indigenous, Media, Politics, Society, Sport | 10 Comments

The celebratory bits of Australia Day have a long and varied history. The official celebration on 26 January of the founding of the first of the colonies began in 1818, and was ordained by Governor Macquarie; it was called ‘Foundation Day’. January 26th is also the date of the arrest of Macquarie’s predecessor, Governor Bligh, in 1808 – an event sometimes called the ‘Rum Rebellion’. Each new colony declared its own foundation day, and it was not until 1935 that the event was celebrated everywhere on that date, and as ‘Australia Day’ – though New South Wales hung on to…

Dec 21 2013

0

And a Merry Christmas to all

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Food & Wine, Health, History, Humour, Indigenous, Language, Media, Music, Other, Politics, Religion, Research, Road Safety, Society, Sport, Theatre | 7 Comments

This is my last post for the year — a phrase my wife says needs a trumpet call, which would be the case had I capitalised the phrase. Ordinary transmission will resume on Monday 6 January. What a year it has been. What other year saw Australia have three Prime Ministers within a few months? The last was 1945, when John Curtin died, to be followed in an interim way by his Deputy Frank Forde, before the Labor Caucus elected Ben Chifley as the new PM. And there were two similar earlier years in my lifetime, 1941, when Menzies, Fadden,…

Dec 11 2013

0

John Howard and the ‘contest of ideas’

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Food & Wine, Health, History, Indigenous, Language, Media, Music, Other, Politics, Religion, Research, Society | 6 Comments

Former Prime Minister John Howard was the guest speaker at a dinner held a couple of months ago to celebrate the 500th issue of the magazine Quadrant. In his speech, which you can read in the current issue of the magazine, he said this: In the end, politics is not a public relations contest, it is a contest of ideas. I think he is right, and I wondered, as I read, what he thought the contested ideas were. Some examples came later. There were people of unsound thought [who] have preoccupied themselves with other causes [than communism]: the causes of radical environmentalism,…