Here’s the holiday issue Big Picture which I held for three weeks to gather enough material for you to delve into.
The period has seen the Wikileaks saga unfold in which governments have squirmed to blame the publisher, Julian Assange, for the problems created by revelations of their perfidy and deceptions of their own people.
They didn’t tell us we couldn’t know what was going on (e.g. in Afghanistan), they just lied to us.
To avoid dealing with the reality, governments and media organisations (who have also failed us abysmally) have described Assange as a ‘whistleblower’ (not true, he’s a publisher), a traitor (not true, he doesn’t live in the USA) that has acted illegally (still no sign that he’s broken any Australian laws despite Julia’s hurried denunciation of him.
Australian in trouble overseas and upset the USA – let’s denounce him and abandon him to his fate. Just like Hicksie.
From a complex systems perspective, it’s all part of the new communications revolution that is proceeding without our ‘leaders’.
Now that anyone with a mobile phone can communicate with anyone else, and with the internet, the community can fact check what the government is serving up to us. When we do, we are finding repeated deficiencies.
In fact our governments are organised for the 19th century – the industrial revolution and mindless jobs in factories.
They haven’t really come to grips with the new reality that those days are gone, that this is a new world with new challenges.
Government is organised to pass information through massive bureaucracies before making decisions which results in decisions that are too late, and are not related to the actual situation.
We saw that with the Victorian bushfire crisis, we’re seeing it now with refugees (sorry, queue jumpers).
Governments are losing power, authority and control as the combined citizenry has access to more information and expertise than narrow focussed government departments, and we are coming to realise that government is becoming our problem, rather than a solution.
As long as government is moving more slowly than the changes that we are experiencing, we’ll experience severe problems.
Because of these complex drivers and forces, Big Picture attempts to raise the issues that no-one else does.
I’ve been abused and attacked for publishing articles that are different to some readers’ viewpoints, and for revealing information that people paid by our taxes did not want revealed. I take such attacks as confirmation that I might be laying bare a few nerves.
As Xmas treats I’ve included some nifty videos, a warning about the ‘recovery’, Wikileaks as seen by AlJazeera, and a pointed few barbs from the colourful Barnaby Joyce.
I hope you enjoy this issue which cannot help but reveal that Labor’s reform agenda is littered with blighted ideas and policies, such as imaging that buildings will improve our childrens’ education while tiresome issues like quality of teaching and learning are quietly ignored.
It’s been a lot of work to get this many issues out and I hope that you have got some value from the result.
Next year I hope to get onto more informative and positive articles that might help us all to survive the various perturbations ahead.
Good luck and an enjoyable break to you all.
Cheers,
Mike
Download:
ABA_103.pdf
