All children are different, but different isn’t wrong, and doesn’t require fixing.
Contestants from the most recent series of Big Brother toast their success º but is that success killing TV creativity?
AAP Image/Nine Network, Big Brother Publicity, Paul Broben
In the age of the “creative economy”, reality programs are dominating Australian TV. The problem is, reality TV is squeezing the creativity out of our screen culture.
For the first time, the February monthly average carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory have passed 400ppm.
NOAA/Wikimedia Commons
We have hit a new milestone in carbon dioxide levels: the average for February topped 400ppm. It’s the first time this has happened in the northern winter, when levels are typically lower than in summer.
The tax burden of a carbon tax could come to represent a benefit for future generations.
Image sourced from Shutterstock.com
Discouraging carbon emissions via a carbon tax could deliver the government much needed revenue.
Aboriginal stories dating back many thousands of years talk of a fire from the sky in an area now home to the Henbury meteorite craters, in the Northern Territory.
Flickr/Boobook
Barack Obama is considering supplying “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. But how meaningful is that description? There are simply “weapons”, all of which can be used for defence or for aggression.
Cartoons can inspire rage – but they can also tell the stories of the marginalised. A panel from The Arrival by Shaun Tan, Lothian Children’s Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 2006.
In the month since the the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, the significance of visual representation has been a topic of much discussion. Political cartoons have the potential to reinforce problematic stereotypes…
The Abbott government’s expedited passage of national security laws in 2014 demonstrated an underlying disrespect for the legislative process.
AAP/Nikki Short
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has made two key pledges in recent weeks – to begin “good government” and to no longer give “the benefit of doubt” to people suspected of planning terrorist activities in Australia…
Literacy doesn’t just mean being able to recognise letters and words on a page.
Shutterstock
We all want young children to be given the very best opportunities to become successful, engaged and passionate readers. The teaching of reading is constantly mired, however, in a tired old debate between…
MONA, which hosts the annual MOFO festival, above, offers a lesson for Australian artists.
AAP Image/MONA
Our major performing arts organisations are Australian culture’s country clubs. Sponsored by a matrix of old money and old-school networks and infused with the new managerialism, the majors currently enjoy…
John Howard sealed his fate by going too far with WorkChoices, but he got the balance right and succeeded with the GST reform.
AAP/Andrew Brownbill
The distinction between the global and the local is collapsing under the pressure of climate change, economic restructuring, global migration and jihadism on the one hand and the populist and information…
Australians don’t like the death penalty – we just don’t want the discomfort of having to care about the people it’s applied to.
EPA/Made Nagi
Barring some sort of last-minute miracle, two relatively young Australian men, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, are going to be killed by the Indonesian state. They will not be the first to die this way…
With Premier Campbell Newman exiting the political stage, Governor Paul de Jersey (left) may become a key player in deciding who forms Queensland’s next government.
AAP/Dan Peled
Driving back to Brisbane from my childhood home of Nambour, I saw the most extraordinary political billboard. In monumental black and white, it simply said: Hung Parliament. Chaos. That these stark and…
Considering the prevalence of typing, why waste time teaching children handwriting?
Shutterstock
Many lament that the “good old days” when they were taught “the basics” at school have gone. When launching the National Curriculum in 2010, then-prime minister Kevin Rudd stated his objective was: … without…
Stéphane Charbonnier’s Charlie Hebdo offended people of all religions, but when does causing offence become unethical?
EPA/Yoan Valat
Causing offence to others often causes hurt. Such actions have been condemned as unethical, even immoral behaviour in a civilised society. There have been many examples. The Bill Henson photographs of…
Adjusted data from Australian weather stations has been peer-reviewed before. But the government’s new technical panel could still offer useful advice.
Bidgee/Wikimedia Commons
The federal government’s new “Technical Advisory Forum” on weather data, announced by parliamentary environment secretary Bob Baldwin last week, will “review and provide advice on Australia’s official…
What happens when a Surrealist parlour game turns into a writing exercise that’s pubilshed? Can we truly call it a collaborative process?
Wikimedia Commons
Pema Düddul, Southern Cross University; Jen Webb, University of Canberra, and Nike Sulway, University of Southern Queensland
Recently, The Conversation published what was described as “an experiment in collaborative writing” (featuring, among others, Dallas J Baker and Nike Sulway of this present article). The question behind…
Peak power use is also a busy time for young families.
Nico Cavallotto/Flickr
A key plank of the Australian Government’s draft energy policy is to reform electricity pricing so that it more accurately reflects rises and falls in peak demand. New tariffs, such as time-of-use (TOU…
In response to deeply unpopular drone strikes, a public rally in Karachi demands the blocking of NATO supplies from Pakistan to neighbouring Afghanistan. The banner reads, in Urdu ‘Rulers! Come out of the US war’.
EPA/Rehan Khan
I learned a number of lessons about Islam in Peshawar, Pakistan. As a senior United Nations official, I arrived in the country within 24 hours of the massive earthquake that struck in October 2005. Pakistan…
Double J staff in the early days. The station’s been going strong for 40 years.
ABC Radio
Australia’s public youth radio station, Triple J, turns 40 today. On January 19 1975, Triple J’s AM predecessor, Double J, infamously burst onto Sydney’s airwaves with the track, You Just Like Me Cause…