What's the Big Idea?: 34 ideas for a better Australia
Australia Institute Press, $34.99 pb, 215 pp
Age of Doubt: Building trust in a world of misinformation
Monash University Publishing, $34.99 pb, 301 pp
Denial, obfuscation, defiance
Australia is timid, insular, conservative. It is unimaginative, hidebound to old orthodoxies, blind to readily identifiable truths. It is meeting with little effective action a host of crises: violence against women, an impending climate catastrophe, intergenerational economic inequality. It has a profound disregard for its First Nations people and, despite a long and significant history of immigration, is hostile to people of colour and people who seek to emigrate to it by boat. It dismisses the arts as so much wankery and regards its environment as a resource to be plundered. It celebrates the philistine and esteems the mining industry as a saviour. Its people cannot lift their eyes beyond parochial and short-term self-interest; the threads that bind them to their communities are fraying. Its public debates are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation, are dominated by special interests, and are conducted at a volume and pitch too loud and too rancorous to be resolved in ways that serve a common good.
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What's the Big Idea?: 34 ideas for a better Australia
edited by Anna Chang and Alice Grundy
Australia Institute Press, $34.99 pb, 215 pp
Age of Doubt: Building trust in a world of misinformation
edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang
Monash University Publishing, $34.99 pb, 301 pp
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