Photo: Denny Muller, Unsplashed

How Things Fell Apart

“How democracies can be sustained as the likely contests over climate change and energy consumption destabilise them will become the central political question of the coming decade.” Professor Helen Thompson, ’Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century’ Like others, I became aware of Professor Helen Thompson’s astounding breadth of knowledge Read more…

Gimme Some Truth

In the wake of St Barnaby’s latest resurrection/resuscitation, the ABC news flashed up with a story about an aborted attempt by his National Party of opportunists, carpetbaggers and grafters to rewrite the Murray-Darling Basin plan, a 2012 bipartisan agreement about how to use the water that flows down Australia’s longest Read more…

All Media is Social

With much of Australia’s ‘mainstream’ media at war with its critics on ‘social’ media, it’s worth reflecting on an observation from a journalist who was at the vanguard of breaking down the distinction between the two. In ‘Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now’, Alan Rusbridger Read more…

The ABC of Trust

With Australians trusting media platforms less than do people in just about every other country, why would you set about dismantling the one institution they trust the most? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our 86-year-old taxpayer-funded and constantly beleaguered public broadcaster, regularly tops surveys as one of the country’s few remaining Read more…