Thank you Matt Granfield, your letter to dad is just brilliant and I want everyone to read it. In fact, it’s the best thing I’ve read on the refugee and asylum seeker issue possibly ever.

Dear Dad,

Imagine if there was a civil war in Australia. Not like the State of Origin dad, a proper civil war. With guns. Imagine if the indigenous population teamed up with all the other non-white recent immigrants in an attempt to remove white Australians from power in a game of black people vs. white people. A bit like chess I guess, but without castles.

Imagine if Team Black’s goal was to remove any influence Christians had over Australia and its culture. I’m not just talking about banning Christmas either, I’m talking about a war with the sole goal of removing all white Australians from positions of power and erasing as much of white Christian history as possible.

Now, imagine if Team Black didn’t just cause a bit of a ruckus in the suburbs where there’s a big majority of black people, imagine if they actually won the war and were now starting to make life hard for white Australians. They start murdering all white politicians and removing any influential white people from other positions power immediately. You can’t be a mayor if you’re white, you can’t be a manager at a company, you can’t even be a school teacher. They imprison anyone who dares speak out against the new regime and they kill anyone who tries to resist. They ban the bible, they ban white TV presenters. They take away all our passports and they ban us from traveling outside the country.

Worse still, for you, they are hunting down anyone who has ever been a member of a church and they’re putting them into forced labour camps. Even praying is now a crime. Remember the time in 1995 when we went to Pizza Hut with the church group and all the grown-ups sang grace at the table. Not softly, but loud enough for Jesus to hear? There were kids working there who knew me and I had to go to school the next day with them. They thought I was in a cult. I got beaten up. I wanted to stone you all to death with frozen cheese at the time, but if they got caught doing that now under the new regime, I could stone you all to death with frozen cheese. In fact, I’d be given a medal for it.

Continue reading Dear Dad, we don’t need to turn the boats away, we need to send them back for more…

I am an Australian citizen and I oppose my government’s vilification of asylum seekers who arrive at our shores. I am also against the mandatory detention of families and their children, who risk their own lives only to be locked in detention centres like prisoners. Seeking asylum is not illegal, yet it is the Australian government who breaches international human rights laws again and again.

To our international neighbours, I would like to clarify a few things so you don’t get the wrong impression of us Aussies. Our previous government was led for over a decade by Former Prime Minister John Howard. He was a brilliant and decisive politician who led Australia through an unprecedented time of economic growth and prosperity. Except he held rather discriminatory views towards not only asylum seekers but also our aboriginal population. Under the Howard years, Australia traded in our morals and compassion for a lot of wealth and security. Today, our country is still rich but not all of us are racist.

If you have read anywhere that refugees are illegal-queue-jumping-unskilled-terrorists who are an undue burden on our society, it’s because of the fine work of our former government, carried on today by some of our politicians and the tabloid media. It was once an easy way to buy cheap votes before election time, but people who actually know and care about what’s going on in this country and the rest of the world don’t think this way. There are more and more of us now who are opening our eyes to the truth.

Australians are incredibly apathetic voters; our last election result was a hung-parliament. Recent Australian history is also marred with racism: the White Australia policy and a stolen generation of Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their families. We haven’t even figured out how to improve the health and livelihood of own aboriginal communities beyond third-world conditions. Et cetera. Yes, we’re an incredibly multicultural society, but our government is out of touch with the people.

You might also have heard that we don’t have the infrastructure or natural resources to support more immigrants and refugees. That would be true because of the way we build our cities and abandon our towns. We waste much of our energy and resources building big houses that take more energy to heat and cool, then we space them out even further in our sprawling cities so that it takes forever to drive anywhere and public transportation cannot be cost effective to build or convenient to use.

Our city dwellers are deaf to the plight of farmers in our country towns who have to work harder and harder to supply our cities with food. We hog their water and too carelessly bury their uneaten food in landfill. Our once productive farmland is being neglected to the point of exhaustion, then divided and sold to property developers and holidaymakers. Generations of farming experience is going to the grave – knowledge that’s irreplaceable. If our cities are full and crowded it’s because nobody cares about the country anymore.

All of this is acceptable to our politicians as long as China keeps buying all of the non-renewable resources we can dig out of the ground. But it’s not sustainable. Apparently, keeping a few asylum seekers away from our shores is much more important than keeping our farmers on their own land. If we’re full, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

If I were an asylum seeker about to board a leaky boat to Australia and I knew all of this, even I might reconsider. But wait, if I’m an asylum seeker, it’s not like I really have a choice.

So c’mon Aussies, let’s end this silly boat people thing already and focus on something that’s really important.

“In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution.” HOME is the new documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand that teaches us about the fragility of the one and only home we all share. It is a beautifully crafted and narrated film that tells the story of our planet through a series of breathtaking aerial photography and footage. Best of all it is free to watch and share online.

You can watch the trailer above and find the full-length HD version at www.YouTube.com/homeproject.

My understanding of good art is that it should challenge the status quo and give us reason to react. Chris Jordan’s work is simply effective by helping people to see and connect with the statistics with which we are inundated. “This is 1 million plastic cups. Which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every 6 hours.”

One of his artworks is shown below. “This design depicts 32,000 barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006, with the vast majority under 21 years of age.”

Thomas L Friedman wrote a great column in the New York Times questioning whether the global financial crisis is indicative of a greater failure in our society.

“What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’” This is the Great Disruption.

Friedman sums up the ever growing US-China economic interdependence brilliantly in this paragraph:

“We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …”

And I believe he is right in saying that we can’t do this anymore. At least not in the way we are currently depleting non-renewable resources and continuing to create unsustainable models of growth.

Friedman interviewed physicist and climate expert Dr Joseph Romm of climateprogress.org, who believes we have “constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations.”

In the words of Romm, “we created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks – water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land – and not by generating renewable flows. But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate…’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Until now it has mostly been environmentalists and scientists who have become alarmed at the environmental disruption caused by our unsustainable behaviour. The disruption of global financial markets has now given economists reason to pay attention too. The scary thing is that these “crises” are the symptoms manifested by a sick system which is getting sicker. A trillion dollar bailout is a very expensive pill to take, but it’s simply not a cure. Will it take a revolution, a war, or the next global health epidemic to wake up our politicians and doctors too?

Like our bodies, the modern world is an interdependent system in which we must recognise that every part is important and valuable. It doesn’t matter how smart our brain is because we simply can’t live without a heart, just as we cannot afford to lose our natural resources, our biodiversity, our Africa or our Antarctica.