“RUSSIANS are shits. They always have been shits. They always will be shits. If you understand that, boys, you can understand foreign policy!
This is what our biology teacher, Norton Hobson, a strongly anti-communist ex-communist, said to us at Melbourne High School in 1960.
Although somewhat of a caricature, Mr Hobson’s pithy statement contains at least an element of truth, which Tony Abbott might keep in mind when he meets President Vladimir Putin at next Saturday’s G20 leaders summit in Brisbane.
Because the G20 is a consensus-based forum, any decision to ban the …
FOR three or four decades Australia has been slipping slowly into a quagmire of idiosyncratic governmental and bureaucratic interference gone mad.
To demonstrate where we are headed, the Advertising Standards Board recently adjudicated a complaint about a television commercial that showed a child picking his nose. The complainant alleged that nose picking was a dangerous activity: “With all the germs and viruses around in this day and age, I would of (sic) thought Hygiene would of (sic) been a high priority.
Surely the ASB should have immediately dismissed this complaint. But incredibly, …
After months of delays and uncertainty, the government finally announced the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (PMLA) shortlists yesterday.
Among the finalists in the fiction category is Richard Flanagan, who won the Man Booker Prize in London last week for his novel ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’. A few conservatives were riled when Flanagan, within minutes of winning his award told the BBC he was “ashamed to be Australian when asked about the government’s environmental and energy policies. Despite his comments Flanagan’s shortlisting might reduce any impression of bias coming …
SOMETHING is rotten in the state of NSW. Last month, despite overwhelming community opposition, the NSW Liberal government joined with the Shooters and Fishers Party to pass legislation to manipulate votes in the City of Sydney.
In essence, the next City of Sydney council election will see every corporation that owns land or runs a business in the local area given two votes, while ordinary citizens get one.
In NSW there is no debate about whether businesses should vote in local council elections. As is the case in other council areas, businesses …
AS someone fascinated by the great split in the Australian Labor Party in the mid-1950s I was delighted to read Julian Croft’s satirical novel ‘Out of Print’, which deals in some detail with the background to the split.
Most of the action takes place in Newcastle in about 1953-54 and deals with a female protagonist, a reporter for the fictional ‘Sydney Morning Times’, who covers the activities of the industrial groupers and the communists in the trade union movement and the sectarian divisions of the time.
The novel does this by featuring …
Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech at the end of the Sydney Recovery from Addictions Walk, outside NSW Parliament House, at noon on Sunday September 14, 2014.
“One of the reasons for today’s event is that often when alcoholics and addicts are drinking and using they hit the headlines, but as soon as they are in recovery they almost always vanish from sight. This means that a great many other alcoholics and addicts are not aware that recovery from addiction is possible and that there is hope for those who still suffer.
Last year …
EIGHTY-FIVE per cent of Australians support the idea that a human being who is terminally ill, with no hope of recovery, should be able to get medical assistance to die. Moreover, there are plenty of medical practitioners who would be willing to provide this ÂÂassistance.
This is the reality of today’s Australia. As a baby boomer entering my twilight years, I have a vested interest in our federal parliament facing up to this reality and passing the necessary legislation without undue delay.
The Medical Board of Australia’s suspension of Philip Nitschke, the …
WHEN I heard GoPro was releasing a harness for dogs I was curious. Could dogcam vision be as riveting as hang-gliding action, mountain biking, rock scaling or clips of catching that big wave?
So I harnessed up our favourite local dog, a West Highland White Terrier called Maddie who attends a weekly dog obedience class in inner Sydney.
She wore a regular GoPro Hero3+ black edition camera for the exercise — the same one used by extreme sports nuts.
Maddie just fits the weight range of dogs GoPro says the harness is suited …
Not Anonymous Anymore
1.The Spirit of Things, ABC Radio National
Sunday 7 September 2014 6:05PM
PROF ROSS FITZGERALD, AUTHOR OF ‘MY NAME IS ROSS, AN ALCOHOLIC’S JOURNEY’ 2012.
Drug addicts and alcoholics make the news when their lives spin out and they land in jail, but recovering from addiction receives little or no attention. The Rev Bill Crews, Director of the Exodus Foundation in Sydney says that the courage, conviction and honesty of those in recovery have a spiritual dimension that is lacking in many churches.
Recovering alcoholics Ross Fitzgerald AM and Jessica M …
Dame Marie Bashir, Governor of New South Wales, awards me a Member of the Order of Australia at Government House, Sydney, on September 3, 2014. I was appointed Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia, for significant service to education in the field of politics and history as an academic, and to community and public health organisations.
LAST year an independent, feature-length documentary, ‘The Anonymous People’, focused on the more than 23 million Americans living in long-term recovery from alcohol and other drug addictions.
For decades, deeply entrenched social stigma has kept the voices of recovery largely silent in the US and elsewhere in the Western world.
However, in this groundbreaking film, a cross-section of sportspeople, politicians, film stars and others came out publicly as recovered or recovering addicts. They explained how, through Alcoholics Anonymous and its offspring — including Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and other 12-step …
