How much money is donated to political parties in Australia every year? Take a moment to contemplate a guess. $5 million? $10 million? $50 million? In 2018, Australian (federal) political parties disclosed that they received $319 million in donations from various organisations and members of the public. An average of $184 million per year was […]
Politics Questions Thinking Uncategorized
Increasingly on social media, we compress our message into the most condensed format possible. Maximising the limited resource of our reader’s attention, we try to get the maximum impact for minimum investment of their attention. But what consequences come of compressed information? Ths sntnc hs bn cmprssd by rmvng th vwls – This sentence has […]
Dear Andrew, Your “Our Iron Ore” campaign has ignited the public imagination. It has reminded people that the resources which lie in the ground actually belong to all of us, the people of Australia. On OurIronOre.com, it states, “We are all impacted by the disappearing iron ore dollars in our economy and we want to […]
Personal Politics Questions Thinking Uncategorized
What constitutes an informed opinion? Does it follow one infallible source of truth? Or does it come from integrating many truths into one’s own? How wide do we open our minds when forming our opinions? Do we go narrow and deep into one specific area? Or broad and shallow across the best of various ideas? […]
Recently, I attended a talk by a Chinese professor of literature who is translating the novel “Finnegan’s Wake” into Chinese, a task which is not to be taken lightly considering the circumstances. The author of “Finnegan’s Wake” is James Joyce, the Irish author famed for his stream-of-consciousness & idioglottic style. Joyce uses words derived from […]
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire Politics, or the game of getting re-elected, is one area where the art of dodging pointed questions is considered a required black art, which is either naturally occurring in an individual or acquired via coaching and specialised training. Politicians of the modern […]
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana Since the beginning of recorded civilisation, we have documented the key moments from our collective existence and defined it as “our history”. This history has shown us where we came from, and with some analysis and understanding, serves to provide insight […]
How do we begin to understand our world? From a young age, we naturally question everything. “Why?” asks the child. “That’s why!” replies an adult, and the process is repeated until the child runs out of questions or, more likely, the adult runs out of patience. At some stage in the journey from child to […]