The Palestine Dilemma

On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists emerged from Gaza to commit an horrendous atrocity against Israeli civilians. This deadly incursion has been well documented so I won’t elaborate on the gruesome details. Inevitably Israel responded with deadly force in order to deter further aggression and to rescue the civilian hostages that Hamas had kidnapped during […]

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The Downside of a University Education

At the age of eighteen, I left my family home in Charters Towers to start an engineering degree at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville. In those days it was quite an extraordinary thing to do! In my high school years I can only remember two students in the cohort that I knew ahead of […]

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The Perfidy of God

Well, after this essay my soul is likely to be sentenced to eternal damnation in Hell, but I can’t but help share with you some of my reservations about conventional religious beliefs. Traditional monotheistic religions have been largely constructed by those who have claimed to have had particular, personal access to God. In ancient times […]

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The Manufacturing of Muhammad

Some years ago I wrote an essay which I titled The Most Famous Man who never Lived which critiqued the mythology that had been created to support the notion that an extraordinary man, who purported to be the Son of God lived on this earth some two millennia ago who held the keys to eternal […]

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Taking Stock


Often when we are absorbed in meeting the exigencies of everyday life we lose our broader perspective. We “can’t see the wood for the trees”! Consequently we fall into the trap of feeling insecure and convincing ourselves that our lives are somehow threatened by modernity. I suppose reading the newspaper doesn’t help. Bad news dominates […]

August 9, 2015

Ordinary Happiness


It is an admirable thing that people assume responsibility for their own well-being. Heaven knows there are so many who want to take on the mantle of victims or expect the state to provide the largesse or the escape mechanism to extract them from their misery. But even those with the praiseworthy ambition to deal […]

August 1, 2015

Accepting the Negative


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 […]

July 19, 2015

A Few Comments on Current Issues


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 […]

July 12, 2015

What’s Happening to Work?


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 […]

July 4, 2015

The Confessions of a Conservative Environmentalist


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. […]

June 27, 2015

The Importance of Productivity


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 […]

June 20, 2015

Lifting the Muslim Veil


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 […]

June 13, 2015

My Confessions of Conservatism


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 […]

June 6, 2015

Being Kind to Yourself


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 […]

May 23, 2015