Think Again

Jennifer speaks with Noongar author Claire G Coleman about the meaning and implications of Invasion Day (officially also known as 'Australia Day').   Claire exposes some of the myths and ‘clangers’ Australians hold about the origins of Invasion Day and Australian history in general.   She places responsibility on the colonists themselves to dismantle colonisation, suggesting they can first inform...

Jacques and Jennifer talk about US global dominance, the various tactics used to maintain this dominance, and how we’re all kept in the dark. The price of this dominance in human and financial terms is enormous... not to speak about the damage to Mother Earth... (and it doesnt mean that other world powers are not doing a bit of the same... but we're kept mostly blined and unaware of what our 'grea...

Jennifer speaks with Andreea Lachsz from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service about the UN anti-torture protocol (OPCAT). This follows their initial discussion on this topic in mid July 2021. Australia signed the Protocol several years ago but has failed to fund and organise for its implementation – even though the extended deadline is 20 January 2022.    The Protocol would establish a system of...

 Returning to Freire’s work for a follow-up program, Jacques explores with some more depth some of the principles underlying his approach as well as some of the sources of his thinking and several of the areas in which his approach has been and continuous to be applied. As so often in Think Again, there’s an argument to reconsider some of the ways in which education and other community programs an...

Jacques remembers one of the most influential educational thinkers of the last 60-or-so years; Paulo Freire, who was born 100 years ago in recife in Brazil, influenced two generations of development and emancipation activists.     This started with his literacy work in Brazil in the early 1960s and after his exile from his country under the military dictatorship in 1964, spreading right across Lat...

Jennifer and Jacques return - again - to the concept of relationality, and how we are all part of a living web of inter-relating and intra-relating.      Our western thinking since the 1600s has set us in a bind that makes it hard to understand this, without some fundamental shift in our perception or ‘metanoia’.      Ignoring this perceptional shift has led and continues to lead to widespread des...

Jacques and Jennifer continue discussion from two weeks ago about the Religious Discrimination Bill being proposed by the federal government. They discuss how it would legalise discrimination and nastiness by religious institutions, based on rather arbitrary Statements of Belief they draw up themselves. Leading up to a federal election, it seems the government thought there was some political adva...

Jennifer and Jacques talk about the Religous Discrimination Bill being presented to Federal Parliament. This Bill would expand the powers of religious insititutions to discriminate - not just on the basis of faith affiliation, but on aspects of identity and lifestyle deemed by the institution to be incompatible with their particular brand of faith. Jacques and Jennifer look at the particular insta...

Jennifer and Jacques talk about the blatant infiltration of military agendas in our education system, with resourcing from the federal government.     This is in the context of the de-funding of our universities, particularly many humanities departments and subjects that involve critical thinking. Most recently, the ‘culture wars’ have been reignited, as the government wants a white, imperialist t...

Linda Bennett and Rodney Sparke from Scaleitdown talk about their campaign against eight and ten-story developments in the midst of Brunswick parklands.     They describe how the developers , Stocklands and Mirvac, have by-passed local government and taken their proposals straight to the Victorian Government.     This means that community members opposing the developments have to take their case t...

Jennifer speaks with Liz Turner from Renegade Activists about the various campaigns coming together to oppose AUKUS, (the new military pact between Australia, the US and the UK).     Very quickly, this pact has brought a range of groups together across Australia, including anti-nuclear, environmental and peace activists.   This may be a positive upside of AUKUS, generating a groundswell of activis...

Jacques remembers one of the most influential educational thinkers of the last 60-or-so years; Paulo Freire, who was born 100 years ago in recife in Brazil, influenced two generations of development and emancipation activists.     This started with his literacy work in Brazil in the early 1960s and after his exile from his country under the military dictatorship in 1964, spreading right across Lat...

Jacques Boulet interviews Dan McKinley, CEO of B-Corporation Dog and Bone  Dan and Jacques have a conversation about a kind of ‘in-between’ space between the ‘normal’ capitalist ways of running business and the more ‘radical’ alternatives we often pay attention to in Think Again.        In B-corporations real transformational relationships, processes and structures are actually being experimented...

Given the PM’s struggles in public oratory and inspiring leadership, Jacques and Jennifer have written a speech for him and they deliver it in this program.      The PM shares his belated insight and thanks Victorians for the sacrifices they have made during COVID, thereby saving thousands of lives - not just in Victoria but also in NSW and Australia.      The PM also reveals his new astonishing i...

With COVID exposing the cracks in our health system and the marginalisation of certain groups who are vulnerable to the virus, Jacques and Jennifer talk about a different approach led by the World Health Organisation that seems to have gone out of fashion. The WHO defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, not just the absence of disease. Health and ill health are...

Jennifer and Jacques talk about the abrupt turn in Australia’s defence policy, with the decision to develop nuclear submarines, and enter into a new security agreement with the US and UK.         Simultaneously we have sent out war signals to China, and offended the French by duplicitously breaking a submarine contract without notice – and France isn’t the only power we have put offside.          ...

Jennifer talks with Lida Hazara, founder and president of Women for Change In Melbourne, an organisation empowering Hazara people in Afghanistan and Australia through education and employment. Lida talks about her life growing up in Afghanistan, fleeing to Pakistan in her teens, and then settling in Australia. We learn what motivated her to establish Women for Change and the difference the organis...

Matthew Rimmer, Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation Law at the Queensland University of Technology and Jacques talk about the 'medical apartheid' which is confirmed (yet again) and made worse by the maldistribution of the COVID vaccines between the rich and the poor nations. Yet again, a political and economic collection of (i) economic powerholders (read: the pharmaceutical industri...

Jennifer interviews Diana Sayed, who is CEO of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights. Diana describes the work of the Centre that supports and advocates for Muslim women in Australia in all of their plurality and multiple ethnicities, sects and beliefs. Diana discusses the situation In Afghanistan through a pro-woman, feminist and human rights lens. Given Australia’s 20 year presen...

Jacques and Jennifer look at the botched and devastating withdrawal of the US and its allies from Afghanistan and try to make sense of it through the lens of history. They look back to the carve-up of the old Ottoman Empire by colonial powers after WW1 (creating divisions that last to today), the US-Soviet competition for influence in Afghanistan leading to endemic corruption and a coup in 1978, t...

Monique Hurley from the Human Rights Law Centre talks with Jennifer about the abuse of many people in our prison system, as reflected in a recent IBAC report: ‘Special report on corrections’. Among the routine  abuses are: unjustified use of force, strip searching and social isolation. Monique outlines what needs to happen to change this situation. This includes Australia implementing the UN anti-...

Matt and Jacques have a conversation based on Per Capita’s last Discussion Paper ‘Generation Stressed’: House Prices and the Cost of Living in the 21st Century. It became clear based on research comparing the cost of housing across three generations – in the 1970s, mid- to late-80s and early 2000s -  the latter - Gen X people - who bought their homes around the turn of the Millennium, suffered fro...

Jacques and Jennifer talk about the scandalously unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines throughout the world, while a few people and companies make billions by charging exorbitant prices (US$16 to $24 a dose, with the cost of production estimated US$1.18 to $2.85 a dose). Meanwhile the more reasonably-priced AstraZeneca vaccine has fallen flat. While richer countries seem happy to pay the highe...

Having held conversations about Human Rights in several previous Think Again programs, we now propose to widen our purview, wondering whether other species and things might have 'rights' as well...'Western Enlightenment' thinking has located the 'me' and the human - the 'Anthropos' - right in the centre of all there is, everything and everybody else... the 'other'... Jacques talks about a more rec...

Jennifer interviews Lucie Krahulcova from Digital Rights Watch about the Australian Government's increasing powers to surveil us, with minimal transparency and accountability. Australia compares badly with other jurisictions in the protection of human rights (such as the UK and even the US), and Lucie talks about the need for a Human Rights Charter or Bill of Rights. She urges us to contact key po...