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- What can we learn from disaster communities?
- New year, a time to embrace the uncertainty of it all
- We could be non-binary
- Adaptive resilience vs safety paternalism
- Left wing, right wing? What just happened to politics?
- Covid, class and the addiction to certainty
- Neoliberalism, the Life World and the Psychopathic Corporation
- Democracy is about our bodies, not just our minds
- What’s your motivation: is it yourself or the change you’re making?
- Mind over matter: The world of abstraction is driving us to destruction
- The real threats to our liberty and survival
- Avoiding the abyss of conspiracy theories
- The difference between a legal system and a fantasy novel
- What’s a conspiracy and what’s just common garden variety corruption?
- Unpredictability, humility and an emerging anthropandemic
- The trilemma – climate change, economic collapse, and rising fascism
- Happy New Normal for the decade ahead
- Fires, liars and climate deniers
- The race to the bottom in australian politics
- Talking about lock-on devices – an article in ‘The Conversation’
- The Ponzi scheme is teetering
- Regenerative culture a key part of the blockade experience
- Staying sane in the late Anthropocene
- Extinction Rebellion
- Major parties have failed on climate, it’s time to rebel.
- Elections In The Late Anthropocene
- It is the Greens that are defeating the Nats and it’s all about your preferences
- Australia’s powerhouse of democracy and innovation is in the Northern Rivers
- Is identity politics a problem for the left?
- The climate emergency and the awful state of Australian politics
- Liberty, freedom and civil rights? Do any of us understand these things anymore.
- Democracy and rights under threat in corporate police state
- The forest wars are back, time to mobilise
- …more commentary
- Workshops
- News & Events
- Media
- A Flood of Emotions – Sydney Ideas Event
- Participatory democracy in the COVID era – SCU podcast
- Activism educator Aidan Ricketts explains how and why protests can be peaceful
- Bob Brown Is Taking “Shocking” Anti-Protest Laws To The High Court
- Anti protest laws could arrest nannas, seize tractors
- “They blinked first”
- Colin Barnett quick to protest against ‘activism degrees’ – The Australian, 16/10/2014
- ‘Degrees in activism’ put brake on growth – The Australian, 15/10/2014
- Magistrate throws out vexatious police case against CSG protesters
- Outrage over school PR ‘by stealth’- The Northern Star
- CSG clash a certainty
- Communities use new tactics
- Gas group attacks lecturer
- …more media
- Activist Resources
- Reviews
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 […]
Continue Reading → 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 […]
Continue Reading → 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.
Continue Reading → 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 […]
Continue Reading → 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.
Continue Reading → 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.
Continue Reading → 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 […]
Continue Reading → 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.
Continue Reading → 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 […]
Politics in the Pub: 24 February 2016.
Continue Reading → 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 […]
I like these sites
Community Organisations
- Code Green Tasmania
- CSG Free Northern Rivers
- Friends of the Earth Melbourne
- Generation Alpha
- Huon Valley Environment Centre
- Lock the Gate Alliance
- Nature Conservation Council NSW
- North Coast Environment Council
- North East Forest Alliance
- Plan to Win
- Rainforest Information Centre
- Save our Foreshore
- Still Wild Still Threatened
- The Change Agency
- The Wilderness Society
Liberty, freedom and civil rights? Do any of us understand these things anymore.
When we think of the word liberty or libertarian, sadly many of us we quickly picture gun-toting rednecks from the […]