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

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Pokemania a sad indictment on the state of play

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Nintendo's mobile-gaming "miracle" Pokemon Go may be bringing millennials out of the house – of their own free will – but its success says a lot about how the whole idea of play has changed, for the worse. The app may be free for smart phone users, but this is pure commerce. It's created what marketers want: more spending in the shops that have shelled out fees to become physical destinations for Pokemaniacs. Yuk. Play has always been about constructing and imagining reality. Now it's about flogging products. It's transforming and reducing homes, memorials and cemeteries into spaces for so-called play, with an eye to profit. It's cannibalising real-world geography, in contrast to traditional play that's bounded inside a "magic circle" in which children play act without corporate scripts. Children of my generation born in the 1970s had the freedom to get dirty, to climb trees and experience real danger. My parents and their friends did e...
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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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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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