In the decade or more I’ve been working in the charitable sector, the one question that seems to pop up frequently is “but how much of the money actually gets to the people?” People, quite reasonably, want to be assured that the money they are giving is achieving good outcomes for the people a charity purports to help. They then make the simplistic equation that low overheads...
The Federal Government today announced it had reached an agreement with the United States to resettle refugees on Manus Island and Nauru in the US. This is incredibly welcome news. The indefinite detention of refugees drove them to despair and hopelessness. Now they have the prospect of starting afresh in the United States. We will now have a hiatus during which we just might be able to have a...
From all the reports I’ve read Donald Trump won the Presidency because people wanted a change from the insider politics of Washington. The more offensive he was, the more bigoted and misogynist his public statements, the more he turned his back on mainstream policies. the more he reinforced his standing as an outsider and so increased his support. Throughout this process people found an...
Two years ago I wrote a blog piece “She’s moving out today” in which I described my thoughts, feelings and hopes as my daughter Jessica left home to undertake an acting diploma in Sydney. Two nights ago she graduated. How those two years have flown! In what seems a very short space of time I’ve had the joy and satisfaction of watching Jess learn the art of acting. I was blown away by the skills...
In the last year or two domestic violence has loomed large in public discussion. No-one seems to know quite how prevalent it is, but we know that 2 women die each week at the hands of their partner and that surveys consistently show up to 1 in 4 women over the age of 15 have experienced at least one episode of violence from an intimate partner. 1. Family violence is overwhelmingly a male problem...
Last week a lot of us were talking about the Essential poll which showed that 49% of Australians wanted a ban on Muslim immigration1http://www.essentialvision.com.au. Like many, I assumed that the reason was the association of Islam with terrorism in popular thinking, but a closer look at the data suggests another story. Those who supported a ban on Muslim immigration were asked the main...
Dear Prime Minister, I followed with some interest the speeches on Australia’s approach to the refugee crisis that you gave this week in New York. Given you have commended Australia’s approach to the rest of the world, I have a few questions I would like to ask. 1. If every country adopted Australia’s approach, where would refugees go? Australia’s approach is built on the...
Sandy and I have watched the last few seasons of House Rules, a TV reality show in which couples renovate each other’s homes. What strikes me is that the attraction of the TV show is not the quality of the renovations produced – if it was we would not be watching amateurs do their thing – but the human drama. Will the couple whose home has been renovated like what they see? Will the...
In the past few years I have done a lot of reflecting around issues of sexuality. One area with which I have only begun to engage is intersex, which I take to refer to people whose biological sex doesn’t conform to either male or female, and transgender, which I take to refer to people whose sexual identity is different to their biological sex. Some reflections: 1. Although intersex and...
A few years ago I went to a workshop where we were invited to participate in a guided imagination exercise in which we imagined ourselves inside a bubble floating through time seeing what our lives would be like in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. I engaged in that exercise this week, not imagining my own life in 5, 10, 20 years but imagining what life would be like for the 1296 people held in...