There is a tape running in my head of a song I remember from my youth. As I recall the words exhorted us to “accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative.” It is certainly in our nature to strive for happiness and avoid pain, discomfiture and negative emotions. But in this essay I want to convince […]

There is a lot happening in the world, and this week, instead of devoting my essay to a specific topic I am going to indulge myself by making a few comments about current issues. Let me first make a comment on the Recognition Referendum debate. The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition joined this […]

Thirty or more years ago I became involved in a couple of organisations that were trying to get a handle on the future. In particular I was interested in the future of work. Over the next ten or fifteen years I was invited to attend many national conferences and presented papers on the subject. At […]

Most of us when we are younger are more idealistic. We see the world embodied in a framework of rights and wrongs, black and white with very little grey! With little understanding of how the world works we believe our idealistic stances will change everything and then all will be well. I was little different. […]

Australia is currently in a rather parlous position. Our economy is in trouble with rising debt and projected deficits extending out to the far horizon. Growth in the economy has stalled and consequently we are faced with high levels of unemployment. The intergenerational report depicts an aging workforce and anticipates further budget difficulties as the […]

We human beings are a gullible lot. We are often inveigled into believing the implausible when it seems attractive to us. The Spanish Conquistadores returned from the New World full of stories about El Dorado, purportedly a city of gold. The myth spurred many expeditions devoted to discovering the wealth of this fabled place. Whilst […]

It is a source of some frustration to me that as I get older I have become more conservative. I made a reasonably successful career based on pushing the envelope, doing new things and doing things differently. I was an inveterate challenger of the status quo. In my somewhat distorted imagination I am inclined to […]

Martin Seligman tells us that those of us who are pessimists have deficiencies in our self-defence mechanisms. As he puts it, such people when faced with something that is not going right in their lives convince themselves that the problem is: Personal – ie it is due to their own personal shortcomings; Pervasive – ie […]

Especially Ordinary Despite our supposed sophistication, vanity is endemic in modern society. I see no end of examples of people who want to look attractive, be seen as important or have some special world-shattering unique characteristics. It seems to me to be a comforting feature of old age to eschew such meaningless pursuits. But then […]

Crocodiles are remarkable evolutionary survivors. They have inhabited the earth in their current form for millions of years. On top of that (or maybe because of that) they are quite ubiquitous, continuing to survive in healthy populations in Africa, Asia and Australia. Their predominant diet is fish but they are very partial also, when the […]