A mother's climate change lament and other paintings

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Find the article on my art exhibition on now at the ACT Legislative Assembly

Popular posts from this blog

When Meat Is Off The Menu

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This week's ABC Four Corners revealed with gut-wrenching images, how cattle  in slaughterhouses have suffered mistreatment.  It's got my family again thinking about the responsibilities we have towards animals. I wrote this for Web Child last month: There's a small revolution rippling along in suburbia, at least in my pocket of the suburbs. And my anecdotal evidence suggests that boys are leading the way. It's vegetarianism, and it contests the stereotype that boys are less sensitive than girls. My seven-year-old son wants to be a vegetarian. His good friend is one. Others in his class have talked about wanting to forgo meat. They are all boys and they each came to this conclusion on their own. “Mum, every time I eat meat, I feel sorry,” said Oliver, one day at the kitchen sink.
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The rainbow nation still blighted by a colour bar

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Sydney Morning Herald , January 22, 2002. Apartheid lives on in the mindsets of South Africans especially in those of the coloureds, observes Toni Hassan. I WAS born in South Africa as a so-called "coloured" person of mixed race, and migrated with my family to Australia in 1978. I was six. I have been back twice: first in 1994 when South Africa said "Yes!" to an amazing transition led by the country's first black leader, the patron saint Nelson Mandela. I returned again recently to see what real change there has been. Among my mob the coloured people there are resignation and despair. There is a curse on coloured people, they say. As my uncle said over breakfast, "During the bad old days of apartheid, the coloureds were too black to get jobs and now they are too white to get what few jobs are left after the good ones have been given to blacks."
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Political donations and the rise of corporatocracy

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Vested interests have always sought to influence politicians but the problem of buying influence has in recent time developed into a cancer undermining the health of Australia’s democracy. Mining industry influence is a key example. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has analysed a dump of 2018-19 donations data on the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) website. It found that the fossil-fuel industry doubled its donations to the major parties the past four years. The Coalition gets the lion’s share, but the amount Labor is ‘gifted’ is not far behind, certainly not insignificant. Drawing on four years of data from 2015-2016 to last financial year, the ACF confirms that the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) gave money to both Liberal and Nationals-aligned entities as well as Labor entities. MCA donated to the Hunter Federal Campaign Account of the Australian Labor Party, an electorate in coal country that was retained last year by Labor’s pro-coal MP Joel Fitzgibbo...
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