Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Denial, obfuscation, defiance

Two earnest books on the challenges ahead
by
April 2025, no. 474

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

Buy this book

Denial, obfuscation, defiance

Two earnest books on the challenges ahead
by
April 2025, no. 474

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.

What's the Big Idea?: 34 ideas for a better Australia

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

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

Buy this book

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.