Love vs Fear

The Essential Phil Harker Some weeks ago I published a tribute to Phil Harker. I thought it might be useful to outline some of his key beliefs. As we travelled on this journey of discovery together, his philosophical understandings and psychological insights had a beneficial effect on my life. It is likely they might be […]

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Australia’s Looming Electricity Catastrophe

The overwhelming victory by Labor in the recent Federal Election will have many flow-on effects. One of the more disastrous will be Labor doubling down on its renewable energy policy. Chris Bowen is already claiming the victory as a mandate to continue his reckless pursuit of renewable energy. It is an assertion that is pretty […]

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A Last Salute to the Good Dr Phil

  My friend of 40 years has now departed this earth. Dr Phil Harker my long-time associate and mentor has left his body and gone to a better place. The world is diminished with his passing. I first met Phil sometime around 1986 when he was part of a selection panel assessing applicants to be […]

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The Creation of History

My long suffering readers will be aware of my fascination with time. It seems indisputable that, no matter how you construe time, the only reality is “now”. No sentient being is able to access any time other than the present. In essence we reconstruct the past and we imagine the future. Mind you some of […]

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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

Especially Ordinary


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 […]

May 17, 2015

A Few Crocodile Tears


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 […]

May 11, 2015

The Indonesian Executions


Well it has finally happened – the two Australian drug traffickers have been executed by an Indonesian firing squad. I abhor capital punishment and this particular event seemed, because of some of the Indonesian incompetence, more barbaric than it need to have been. Despite my feelings for Chan, Sukumaran and their families and loved ones, […]

May 1, 2015

The Enlightened Mind


In previous essays, I have proposed that the defining characteristic of our humanity is our consciousness. Because we not only have the ability to think and make decisions but are also consciously aware of these mental processes we have what is sometimes called a “theatre of mind”. Consequently we are forced to deal with two […]

April 25, 2015