I started as a journalist just as hot metal printing was being banged out of publishing companies in the late 1970s — an era now referred to as the Golden Age of journalism. Over the ensuing 40 years, the world of journalism has largely been kind to me, but with all the good has been much bad. I’ve had ringside seats for much of the worst that journalism has had to offer: Fleet Street malpractice and corrupt journalism of the type that led to the phone-hacking revelations
When Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work was published in 1982, my predictions about the potential impact of the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Revolution were regarded as wildly exaggerated and hence not taken seriously. Thirty years later they read like a statement of the blindingly obvious and could now be dismissed as, ‘Well, it was always inevitable, wasn’t it?’
The Australian colonies began very unpromisingly as a convict society built on Aboriginal dispossession. Nevertheless, robust elected institutions soon developed. There was responsible government by the 1850s, full manhood suffrage by the 1860s, the secret ballot (a local invention) and payment of members
On a physical level Homo sapiens (Latin: ‘wise man’) have changed little over the last 20,000 years. Nonetheless, there has been a tremendous evolution in our lifestyle (at least for the majority), and this has been the consequence of a multitude of significant discoveries, inventions and revelations that plaster the mosaic of human history
I received my first inkling of my own sexuality at about age 9. I was always precocious. In those days, it was not a very good discovery to find that one was homosexual. The afternoon tabloids were full of stories of entrapment and arrests of gay men in Sydney. They included some famous visiting artists, like Claudio Arrau, the great concert pianist
Recently, I visited Kenya. A huge legal conference held in the Jomo Kenyatta Conference Centre in the middle of Nairobi. The meeting gathered lawyers from all parts of the Commonwealth of Nations. This is the club of nations all but one of which were once ruled by Britain. Queen Elizabeth II is the symbolic Head of the Commonwealth
The small number of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children at school — 147,181 — belies the complexity and magnitude of the failure of the national school system to ensure that they are educated. Only half the schools in the education system have Indigenous students
In this chapter I will be discussing the role of the media in a liberal democracy, and the tension between the essential free flow of information in a free society and the accountability which all power, including media power, must be subjected to for a society to be truly free
When I was born, the human population was about two billion. Today, it is approaching seven billion. In the 1960s, US biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of the consequences of uncontrolled population growth. In forecasting mass starvation if the population continued to grow, he was echoing the gloomy thoughts of Malthus, who argued over 200 years ago that population was increasing faster than food production could be expanded
This chapter describes the roles that new media might play in rebuilding links between Australia’s diverse publics and the formal political system. We will show that democratic engagement has been hollowed out. This is partly an unintended consequence of the significant (broadly bipartisan) policy reorientation that has occurred since 1983; and partly a consequence of the new diversity in Australian society