My long-term, long-suffering readers will understand that I (and most likely all of us) have had an abiding interest in happiness, what promotes it and how it may be attained. Indeed if you search the archives of my blog posts you will find a number of essays on this topic. My essay this week will […]

It was one of the most pitiful sights I’ve seen for a long time. Former Rugby League player, State of Origin and Australian representative, Glenn Lazarus was sitting in front of the TV cameras trying to look hurt and demanding that Tony Abbott apologise for his remarks about a “feral” Senate, and this coming from […]

In our little book Humanity at Work and its subsequent sequel The Myth of Nine to Five the good Dr Phil and I outlined the prime human needs as: Physical needs, Social needs, Intellectual needs, and Spiritual needs. I won’t waste your time going through these as they are largely self-evident. But in this essay […]

Hands up all those who would like to live in an Islamic Caliphate under Sharia law? Mm – I don’t see many takers. Wouldn’t you enjoy living somewhere where you could be executed for apostasy, being homosexual or insulting the Prophet Muhhammad? Wouldn’t you be thrilled to have our women subjugated as second class citizens, […]

When I was younger I was a great fan of George Bernard Shaw. I studied Caesar and Cleopatra at school. My English master was a devout catholic and dismissed Shaw as a lightweight playwright and insisted that we should read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in juxtaposition. Well, I am not about to criticise the works […]

Christmas 1970 was not a good time for my wife and I. We were living in Townsville and our first-born, Belinda, was about fifteen months old. My parents lived in Charters Towers, not much more than an hour’s drive south of Townsville. We intended to drive there and spend Christmas with my parents. There had […]

Progress and Religion It is an interesting fact that most economically developed democracies, with the exception of the USA, have become more secular. Research indicates that the extent to which people emphasise religion and engage in religious behaviour could, indeed, be predicted with considerable accuracy from the level of a society’s economic development. In their […]

One of life’s idiosyncrasies is how it is seemingly full of paradoxes. One paradox that interests me is our various responses to stress. Some people seem to be able to cope with life threatening illnesses with equanimity. Others seem to fall apart at the seams when faced with, what seem to the rest of us, […]

Education has been under the spotlight in recent times, largely because of Australia’s declining performance on the world stage. There have been various reports (chief amongst them the Gonski report) about how we need to spend more money to ensure our children move their way up the international league table of educational outcomes. The dominant […]

I have written many essays on human behaviour. Apart from the music of Mozart, test cricket, and catching Barramundi, there are few subjects that interest me more. Most psychologists would concede that our biological history and our socialisation, particularly in our earlier years, have a large impact on how we behave. In this regard one […]