Words like freedom, rights and liberty are values that the vast majority of people aspire to for themselves and others yet they remain poorly understood and as a result vulnerable to being manipulated.

When we think of the word liberty or libertarian, sadly many of us we quickly picture gun-toting rednecks from the […]

It’s time we had a good hard talk about the corporate assault on democracy that is unfolding all around us. Globally, democracy is not faring well, with emergent authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China gathering strength whilst existing democratic states in Australia, US and Europe and UK struggle against a persistent attack […]

The NSW government recently gazetted a new regulation under the Crown Lands Management Act that removes the right to peaceful assembly, gathering or protest on public land anywhere in NSW. This is a wholesale attack on the tradition of democracy that can only be described as totalitarian. Under the new law any assembly […]

Our region has a proud history of standing up to protect our precious environment. We pioneered direct action for environmental protection at Terania Creek in the 1970s, literally wrote the book on forest activism in the 1990s with the successful old growth forest campaign by the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA), and […]

Brace yourself for a lot of elections in 2018/9. Apart from a looming federal poll this year, we are expecting elections in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, and the NSW state election will be March 2019, but because it has a fixed date, the campaign starts nearly a year out.

Elections are only […]

If dying rock stars was the worst thing about 2016 then things must have been very comfortable back then. 2017 has been a bit of a shocker. It could not have been a worse start really with the hapless Trump maladministration getting underway. Trump and his rapidly disintegrating band of cronies has been […]

The net result, an Australia that has both back wheels bogged in climate denial, coal industry protectionism and religious motivated homophobia.

I was recently invited to speak in a panel discussion about individualism with two excellent co-panellists our illustrious former Mayor Jenny Dowell and Lismore’s new and quite surprising Bishop Gregory Homeming. A very interesting topic in these days of late stage capitalism and one I found myself contemplating deeply before […]

Capitalism has its many flaws and neo-liberalism even more so as it reduces our environment, our communities and our cultures to mere commodities with tradeable values. Probably the greatest generic error of both theories is their abject failure to align themselves with the observable and known laws of basic physics.

Climate change is […]

We are certainly facing challenging times. The growth of fascism in Europe, the US and Australia, fuelled by a concoction of traditional racism and uber nationalism combined with corporate greed is a potent cocktail for accelerating destructive forces.

There are no magic bullet answers. All around me I see people struggling to […]

The election of Trump presents very challenging times ahead for those of us who care about the planet, human rights, equality and peace. He represents the raw face of corporate power over people and the environment, the veneer of civil democracy has been torn away and in its place we are seeing an […]

As the dust settles on an extraordinary federal election; we came very close to a hung parliament as nearly a quarter of voters rejected the two major parties.

Despite the duopolistic commentary flowing from the big old parties, I personally don’t see a hung parliament as a bad outcome. A hung parliament is […]

Corruption is an imprecise concept. At its most obvious it about under-the-table bribes to secure specific outcomes, but that is just the tip of the iceberg of practices that corrupt our political system. Corporate donations to major political parties is one of the most pervasive corrupting influences in Australian politics.

Globally and […]