| Michael McDonald | Updated January 17, 2012 |
On Thursday, January 26, Byron Shire, along with the rest of Australia, will be celebrating Australia Day – see www.byron.nsw.gov.au/australia-day.The fashion for widely celebrating the birth of our nation on January 26 could be said to begin in 1938, marking the 150th anniversary of the First Fleet’s arrival. It is a perverse choice, given that the nation of Australia did not exist Read more »
During the 1960s and 70s it used to be a matter of pride among the radical young – before they moved on to make a killing in the stockmarket and buy the beach house at Newport – to be on record with our homegrown secret service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Read more »
Having abandoned the natural rhythm of the seasons as our measure of time, we now struggle with the passage from the ‘old year’ to the ‘new year’, characterised by the Christian celebration of Jesus’s putative birthday, a bizarre ritual involving a white-bearded obese man in a red suit and the attendant flogging of stuff, and finally the joyous addition of further Read more »
In a world drenched in violence, there are some men trying to make a positive difference, and among them are Australian role models in sport, media and comedy. Last Friday White Ribbon Day (www.whiteribbon.org.au) saw men swearing to ‘never to commit, excuse or remain silent about violence against women’. Read more »
A recent online poll by the Sydney Morning Herald found most respondents despondent about the ability of young people to make positive change in the world. In fact, youth were generally regarded as a write-off by all but a small percentage of those polled.Perhaps the SMH readers were still waking up and had yet to have their first coffee. Maybe their significant others had just dissed them or p Read more »
The World Health Organisation’s World Mental Health Day passed quietly on Monday, not rating nearly as many column centimetres as a royal wedding or Paris Hilton’s latest escapade. Read more »
The only thing which stands between us and the barbarism of, say, an LA-style urban sprawl is regulation of property development via a planning sytem. And that planning system is kept honest not by the wayward whims of politicians but by the force of residents wanting to keep their backyard liveable, even beautiful. Read more »
Bugger global warming, the really important question of the week is whether or not Tony Abbott told Tony Windsor he would do anything short of selling his arse to become PM, and might do that anyway if conditions required it. Abbott vehemently denies he said such a thing, while one of his colleagues hardly helped by castigating Windsor for airing a private conversation. Which one of them is lyi Read more »
The Australian Productivity Commission’s report Caring for Older Australians (www.pc.gov.au/projects/inquiry/aged-care/report) was released last week. It sparked a flurry of interest in the news media and many responses from care organisations. The ABC’s 7.30 ran a good report on the issue on Tuesday last week and a transcript is available at www.abc.net.au/7.30, along with video fo Read more »
Love it or hate it, local government is one of the biggest employers in the Shire and has profound effects on our lives, whether it be in deciding on the number of storeys allowed in a building or simply filling the potholes outside our front yards. It is also the disputed battleground where state government policies manifest, for good or bad. Read more »