Are you feeling swamped by the world’s biggest problems?

Source Facebook

Do you feel overwhelmed by the biggest issues shaping everyday life climate disruption, housing pressure, food prices, insurance, government spending? I did too.

For a long time my response lived in my head. Reading more. Arguing better. Feeling frustrated that public debate kept sliding into blame. None of that helped. What shifted things was doing something much simpler. I joined groups. I went to workshops. I put myself in rooms with people who were already translating big problems into practical action.

I have written before about the victim triangle and how easy it is to slip into it when the world feels out of control. What I learned through participation is how people climb out of it. Not by pretending the problems are smaller, and not by blaming others, but by reconnecting with responsibility and control.

One of the clearest examples for me has been Farmers for Climate Action. What works in spaces like this is not ideology. It is community. You learn alongside others. You share uncertainty. You are shown where effort counts. No one is cast as a villain or a victim. People are treated as capable decision makers.

That pattern repeats across other community based organisations like Landcare. Workshops, peer networks, and practical forums all do the same capacity and capability building work. They replace overwhelm with participation. They turn big abstract issues into things you can act on with others.

This is the shift I wish we talked about more. When people feel powerless, blame becomes a coping mechanism. When people feel supported and capable, responsibility returns.

If public debate feels stuck, it may be because we keep asking people to care without showing them how to act. The way forward is not louder arguments. It is clearer pathways and communities that make engagement feel possible.

That was the circuit breaker for me.

HT to Maryvonne Norman whose excellent Fb post prompted this article

If parliament was held to workplace standards

Seen through a corporate leadership lens, the recent analysis by Amplify reads like a board paper titled Why nothing got done.

In a six month period, almost half of parliamentary sitting time was absorbed by point scoring, disruption and theatre, with policy work compressed into what remained. The finding gained public attention through an ABC News report, where the framing was very clear.

“Parliament is wasting our time.”
Georgina Harrison, Amplify CEO, ABC News interview

A board sees executive time diverted from delivery to performance. Behaviour consumes oxygen. Risk and reputation join the discussion. This is the moment directors shift from observation to intervention.

The accountability picture sharpens further when the numbers are spelled out in operational terms.

“In the last six months of parliament, 28 business days were wasted on political point scoring.”
Georgina Harrison, Amplify CEO, ABC News interview

In big business, accountability concentrates at the top. The CEO, the chair and the senior leadership team carry responsibility for how time is used and how people behave in decision making forums. Read through a board lens, this section feels like a leadership issue parked under general business, then left there.

Time spent this way erodes value. Twenty eight business days in six months shows productivity leaking, opportunities missed and direction slipping. In board shorthand, this reads as a performance issue deferred again, while investors circle and analysts mark execution risk.

Governance systems succeed or fail on consequences. Standing rules provide structure, yet boards judge systems by impact. The ABC report captured the long running nature of the issue clearly.

“Decades of criticism about behaviour and limited policy debate have failed to shift the dynamic.”
ABC News, interview summary

A governance committee hears this and recognises a familiar problem. The rules exist. The outcomes drift. That is the trigger for change. Meeting formats reset. Speaking rules sharpen. Incentives move. Performance consequences apply.

Culture sits alongside leadership throughout this analysis. Culture shows how power behaves in daily practice. Persistent dysfunction points to weak authority, incentives pulling sideways and consequence gaps left unattended. On a board paper, this section reads like culture written in the margins of the minutes.

The conclusion arrives without flourish. A corporate organisation facing these signals moves quickly into review mode. Senior leaders face scrutiny. Behaviour links directly to performance. Governance structures undergo redesign with urgency. In business shorthand, this looks like intervention approved, timetable attached.

Politics operates under a different shield. Parliamentary leadership sits apart from the accountability standards applied across big business every day.

To a board audience, the final line reads as risk identified, owner missing.

 

The Kath and Kim meme that turned into a sharp little lesson in public disagreements.

Image Source Facebook

I shared this Kath & Kim meme on Facebook as a reminder. It turned into a sharp little lesson in public disagreements.

It’s doing what satire does best. Pointing at a pattern and trusting people to recognise it. Old ideas come back. The language changes. The instincts don’t.

One response I received took it as a literal claim, as if I were saying these moments in history are the same thing. That reaction lingered longer than the disagreement itself.

Public disagreements often split at a deeper point than the issue being argued.

It made me think about how differently people respond when something presses on identity.

Some people can sit with that pressure. They adjust their view. They accept that history leaves fingerprints on the present. Connections don’t feel dangerous to them.

Others move quickly to shut it down. The first move is separation. These things have nothing to do with each other. End of discussion.

That explanation doesn’t fit what I’m seeing. What feels more relevant is how comfortable people are with revising a view.

Ideas don’t disappear. They travel through history, change names, and slowly get normalised.

If you’re able to admit error, patterns become visible. You expect ideas to repeat, to reappear with better branding, to sound more reasonable the second time around.

People who can revise a view tend to treat history as something you learn from.

If that admission feels too costly, history stays boxed up. Each event stands alone. Calling things “unrelated” keeps the present uncomplicated.

What this exchange clarified for me was that we weren’t arguing about the meme. We were talking past each other. One response was about continuity. The other was about containment.

The difference shows up clearly in conversations like this.

That realisation took the edge off.

It reminded me that people arrive at conversations with different limits, different stakes, and different reasons for holding the line where they do.

How do societies notice patterns early if they refuse to look at where ideas come from?

Often the most telling part is not what someone objects to, but what they refuse to connect.

Looking for a win where there isn’t one

Cartoon by Roz Chast, published in The New Yorker. Used here for the purpose of commentary and review.

This cartoon by Roz Chast has me frozen at my desk. Elbows planted, fists pressed either side of my mouth, mind ticking over.

A row of lottery balls. Each carries something that holds up on its own. A fraction. A negative. A Roman numeral. Pi. Side by side, they suggest a winning combination. Side by side, they amount to nothing at all.

What I feel first is a sense of helplessness. A reminder that we can only control what is in our control, yet so much feels out of our control. The numbers sit there calmly, as if daring you to argue with them. You cannot. They are correct. They also get you nowhere.

I recognise this feeling. We live inside it.

We gather facts from different places and trust they will cooperate. Data, personal experience, expert opinion, history, instinct. Each comes with its own logic. Each carries weight. Then we stack them together and expect coherence, certainty, reward. When that does not arrive, frustration creeps in.

The digital age feeds this habit. It is a gift. It is also a curse. Access to information feels like power. Volume feels like progress. Speed feels like clarity. What it often delivers is overload. Different systems of meaning collide on the same screen, stripped of context, flattened into equivalence. Everything looks equally convincing. Nothing quite adds up.

The cartoon also speaks to fairness. Even if these numbers were drawn, the system would refuse them. No payout. No recognition. Rules matter. Frameworks matter. Outcomes only count when they are recognised by the structures that govern them. This is uncomfortable to sit with, especially for people who value effort, evidence, and good faith.

I find myself thinking about public debate, policy, community conflict, even family conversations. We argue as though there is a single winning combination. If we explain it better. If we add one more piece of information. If we line things up more neatly. The cartoon suggests something else. Sometimes the issue is not effort or intelligence. Sometimes the pieces belong to different games.

I do not feel smarter after looking at it. I feel more aware of the limits, and of how often I ignore them. There is no win in it. Just recognition.

 

When will we start responding to risk before people are harmed

We are very good at responding to shock.

After something terrible happens, systems move quickly. Reviews are announced. Events are isolated. Responsibility is narrowed to a moment, a person, a place.

What remains harder to face is everything that came before.

The figures state what cannot be ignored. In the most recent year, 3,307 deaths were recorded as suicide. Seventy-nine women were killed by domestic violence. Thirty-three Aboriginal people died while in custody.

Different circumstances, different systems, the same outcome.

None of these deaths arrived without warning.

Risk does not appear suddenly. It accumulates. It shows up in missed follow-ups, thresholds that are too high, services that do not speak to each other, and responsibility that slips sideways between institutions. It lives in the space between what is known and what is acted on.

We talk about safety after harm occurs. We talk less about prevention. We avoid root causes because they require sustained attention rather than rapid response, coordination rather than containment, and action while outcomes are still uncertain.

Prevention does not come with a single defining moment. It rarely produces a headline. It relies on noticing patterns early, intervening sooner, and treating risk as something to be managed over time rather than explained after loss.

If we are serious about safety, the question is not how decisively we respond once lives are lost.

It is whether we are willing to respond while there is still time to prevent harm, even when the story has not yet forced our hand.

Jamberoo history humour and the joy of taking ourselves seriously

Jamberoo has a lot to be proud of and it certainly never lacked confidence.

According to the local correspondent for the Kiama Independent in the late 1800’s what it sometimes lacked was musical ability, favourable weather patterns, and a shared view on how to handle young men with too much energy and not enough supervision. The local newspaper shared his views with a straight face.

In 1887, the colony entertained the idea of calling itself “Australia”. Jamberoo mulled over the proposal and showed little enthusiasm.

The local correspondent described the idea as one of those foolish notions the colonial government picked up from time to time. The idea raised eyebrows, conversations carried on at the pub, in the butcher and baker’s shops, and through sewing groups, while the paper moved on. Readers kept pace or fell behind.

In 1890, Jamberoo floated the idea of forming a local band. The correspondent attended the meeting, listened carefully, then reached for the claws. He reported that a gathering of half a dozen Jamberoo cats produced sounds more pleasing than those scraped from the dead fellow creatures used to make catgut strings.

Visitors received a public service announcement. Arrive during band practice and you would understand immediately what the fuss involved. Action taken, reputation adjusted.

The same year delivered frogs. Not a few, not a rumour, but thousands. Captain Garde of the steamer Illawarra stood on deck at Shoalhaven Wharf when objects struck him like hailstones.

Daylight revealed frogs across deck, wharf and water. They fell for ten minutes, arrived in good health, then carried on hopping towards Wollongong as if aerial travel formed part of normal routine. The paper reported it as routine which made it funnier than any embellishment would have.

Then came the larrikins. Jamberoo sat inside a wider Kiama problem that escalated from nuisance to civic emergency. Bridges suffered damage. The town pump broke twice. Horses bolted after deliberate scares. Church windows shattered.

One New Year’s Eve saw 40 to 50 men and boys roaming, singing, hooting and pelting buildings. The court imposed the maximum fine. The community debated stronger measures and ordered a cat o’ nine tails by steamer. The cat arrived.

Threats followed. Actual flogging rarely did. The town demonstrated enthusiasm for symbolism and restraint in execution.

Ambition ran alongside all of this. Jamberoo carried pride in hills, cows and distance from coastal bustle. The paper described it as picturesque and impractical in the same breath. Big ideas surfaced anyway. The district dreamed, announced schemes with confidence, then watched resources thin out. Earnest campaigns appeared, gathered momentum, then quietly dissolved. The effect stayed visible. Later jokes carried extra weight because the groundwork was already in print.

When the nation’s capital was being decided, Jamberoo put itself forward as the Bush Capital. Supporters pointed to green hills, dairy country, space, calm, and distance from Sydney politics. The argument reflected how Jamberoo saw itself. Sydney politicians continued their search elsewhere. The paper recorded Jamberoo’s confidence and the broader response in close succession, then turned the page.

Smaller moments filled the margins. Visitors received warnings about local music. Outsiders earned suspicion, hospitality, then criticism in columns. Public enthusiasm surged, committees formed, and minutes followed. Jamberoo showed itself lively, observant, and fond of commentary on its own behaviour and not happy with Kiama Council governance.

Jamberoo took itself seriously. Very seriously. Reading the paper now, you’re reminded how fortunate it was that these debates stayed on the page and in the pub, rather than being amplified in real time. A band meeting, a capital bid, frogs from the sky, all of it received careful attention and confident opinion. Social media would have been carnage. Half the district would still be making its case.

BTW Did you know this? I didn’t.

Before Federation we were know as The Australian Colonies and legally and politically, it was six British colonies, not a country. On 1 January 1901, the colonies federated to form The Commonwealth of Australia

When leadership mistakes discipline for strength

The Liberal National Coalition is back where it started, fractured, performative, and unable to hold itself together when pressure arrives.

Eight months after the post election split and awkward reconciliation, the Coalition is again unravelling, this time in full public view. The immediate trigger is procedural, Nationals frontbenchers quitting the shadow ministry after Sussan Ley insisted three Nationals resign for crossing the floor on the government’s hate crime bill. The response from National’s Leader David Littleproud was escalation, not resolution.

As Michelle Grattan observed, Ley was boxed into a no win position. Shadow cabinet solidarity is not optional theatre, it is the basic mechanism that allows an opposition to function. Ignoring the breach would have weakened the role itself. Enforcing it exposed how little authority the structure now carries.

This is the leadership failure. Not the rule enforcement, but the absence of relational authority that makes rules workable.

True leadership shows itself before a crisis, not during the press conference that follows. It builds shared expectations early, it names boundaries clearly, and it invests in trust so that discipline is not mistaken for punishment when it arrives. When that work is missing, every corrective action looks like aggression and every disagreement turns into a test of dominance.

What we are seeing is a coalition that treats leadership as positional rather than relational. Titles exist, but consent does not. Authority is asserted rather than carried. The result is a constant cycle of brinkmanship where internal players use public exits to gain leverage, knowing the system lacks the cohesion to hold.

The timing makes this worse. With the government under pressure following the Bondi attacks, the opposition had an opportunity to demonstrate resolve, seriousness, and focus. Instead, attention swung inward. The message to the public is confusion, not authority.

The pressure on the Nationals leader is just as telling. David Littleproud abstained rather than lead, then framed the decision as procedural while insisting the Coalition relationship remained intact.

It is the language of someone managing fallout, not setting direction. When a leader cannot carry their party with them on a defining vote, and cannot clearly own the consequence of that choice, authority drains away.

The public sees a leader under constant internal pressure, responding to events rather than shaping them. In moments like this, leadership is revealed not by statements about unity, but by whether anyone is still prepared to follow.

We have explored this in previous posts . Leadership that relies on control rather than legitimacy collapses under stress.

Organisations that confuse unity with silence find themselves brittle when disagreement appears. And when leaders inherit broken structures without repairing how power is exercised inside them, every decision becomes combustible.

The Coalition’s problem is not ideology or personality. It is structural. Until leadership is understood as something built with others rather than imposed on them, these crises will keep repeating. Different actors, same script.

Leadership is not tested by loyalty in easy moments. It is revealed by how disagreement is held without the whole structure tearing itself apart.

What communities lose when lived experience is ignored.

Psychology shows we feel loss twice as strongly as gain. So when lived experience is not deliberately carried forward, change stalls. Familiar patterns win. Old mistakes return dressed up as new debates.

Communities like to think they are good at remembering. They are not.

They remember dates, names, anniversaries. They remember who was on which committee and who fell out with whom. What they forget is how decisions were made, what it cost to get agreement, and who carried the weight when things went wrong.

My previous post dealt  with recognition, the moment people lean forward and see themselves. This one deals with what communities lose when that recognition never makes it into decisions.

Because loss hurts twice as much as gain feels good, change faces a headwind.

When lived experience is not deliberately held and shared, communities lose ground. Quietly at first. Then all at once.

They lose their memory. People leave. Staff retire. Volunteers burn out. Small business owners move on. What walks out the door with them is the why, not the what. New leaders arrive and inherit problems stripped of context. Old decisions are waved away as historic, which often means inconvenient. The same arguments return with fresh language and everyone wonders why nothing changes.

They lose coordination when pressure hits. When stress arrives, and it always does, groups retreat into silos. Councils consult late. Agencies defend their patch. Community organisations scramble beside each other rather than together. Without a shared memory of how cooperation has worked before, decision making turns reactive. Effort duplicates. Public disagreement escalates and trust thins.

They lose credibility with their own people. Residents can smell process a mile off. They know when engagement is theatre. When people are asked to comment after options have already settled, they disengage. Meetings empty. Submissions dry up. Goodwill drains away. Once lost, it is slow and costly to rebuild.

They lose the ability to shape what comes next. When lived experience is absent, others step in. External advisers arrive with neat models that flatten local complexity. Decisions drift away from those who live with the consequences. Communities stop setting the direction and start reacting to it.

They lose time they do not have. Each round of relearning wastes energy. Complexity grows. Resources tighten. Mistakes become more expensive. The risk is not standing still. It is staying busy while falling behind.

They lose people. Capable contributors step back when they see the same conversations replayed with no accumulation of learning. Volunteers burn out. Staff leave. Younger people look elsewhere. Systems that cannot learn from themselves struggle to keep anyone who can.

They lose a closing window. There are still people around who remember when cooperation shifted outcomes and compromise mattered. That knowledge disappears quietly. Once gone, it cannot be rebuilt from reports or minutes.

This pattern has become embedded in corporate culture because modern organisations reward visible movement over accumulated understanding. New leaders arrive under pressure to signal change, legacy knowledge is treated as baggage rather than ballast, and past decisions are reduced to slide headings stripped of context. Speed, novelty, and personal imprint carry more status than continuity.

At the same time, high turnover, restructures, and consultant driven frameworks fracture memory by design, knowledge is modularised, handovers are thin, and learning is assumed to live in systems rather than people. Loss aversion does the rest. Protecting reputation, control, and momentum feels safer than reopening how decisions were made or acknowledging what went wrong. The result is a culture that looks busy and future facing, while quietly discarding the very experience that could prevent repetition and failure.

This is not about nostalgia or heritage.

It is about whether communities choose to keep the knowledge they have already paid for, or keep relearning the same lessons at a higher price each time.

There is still time to hold lived experience where decisions are made, and stop paying twice for forgetting.

Psychology shows we feel loss about twice as strongly as gain. So when lived experience is not deliberately carried forward, change stalls. Familiar patterns win. Old mistakes return dressed up as new debates.

The Goodreads reading challenge and other suggestions I declined.

Every January, Goodreads acts. It prompts readers to set a reading challenge, choose a number, track progress, and share results. The message sounds cheerful. The structure sits underneath it is managerial.

I feel frustration at an app assigning me homework. I want to scream.

Reading entered my life as refuge, curiosity, argument, and pleasure. I read when a sentence catches or a character resonates. I follow books that open doors I did not know existed. None of that needs a target. None of it improves when measured.

When Goodreads introduced the challenge, reading changed shape. A private exchange turned into a task list. Pages became units. Books became ticks. A progress bar stepped into the space where attention once lived. Speed started to count. Comparison followed. A long novel began to feel like a poor choice, while a slim book felt efficient. Pleasure slipped toward performance.

Some readers accept this frame. They describe the challenge as motivation. Life feels crowded. A number promises structure. For them, the system works as intended.

I read in seasons. Some years I read fewer books and let them linger. Some years one novel rearranges how I see the world. Other times I move quickly, sampling voices, following a line of interest wherever it leads. None of those choices respond well to measurement.

A reading challenge does not allow for rereading a paragraph because it sounded better in theory. It does not recognise abandoning a book that feels wrong for this moment. It assumes more equals better. It assumes finishing equals success. Reading does not work like that.

The cost shows up  when reading begins to feel like unpaid labour. Daily reminders feel less friendly than supervisory. The act starts to resemble fitness tracking, streaks protected, output optimised. Competition seeps in. Who read more. Who stayed on track. Who fell behind. Numbers replace attention. Curiosity thins out.

So I ignore the challenge. I do not set a number. I do not track progress. I let books arrive and leave as I choose.

Reading gives me enough without asking me to prove anything back.

Why are people listening differently when local history is told through lived experience?

My experience has shown me that telling local history through lived experience draws a response rooted in recognition rather than nostalgia.

People are asking how using history to share lived experience changes the way decisions, relationships, and reputation are understood in the places they know well. From there, the questions deepen.

I am being invited to speak to community groups about history, and the invitations keep coming. Each one begins in a similar way. People say they know the dates. They know the names. They know the family trees. What they want to hear is what life felt like. Over time, a pattern has emerged.

The curiosity has grown alongside a book I am writing. It is historical fiction set in my village of Jamberoo around Federation. An elderly widower marries a much younger woman when circumstance leaves them both with few options. The marriage unsettles the family. Relationships strain. Friendships shift. The town steps in and fills the silences.

At its heart, the book is about the courage it takes for a woman to live outside the version of her that a community has already decided on, before they’ve even met her.

That story catches attention because it sounds familiar. Every community recognises how quickly private lives become everyone’s business . Reputation circulates. Memory lasts.

When I talk about the book, I also talk about the research behind it. Family histories tend to preserve facts with care. They record births, deaths, marriages, places, and dates. The outline survives. What slips away is the experience of living inside those moments.

You know what happened. You rarely know what it demanded of the people involved.

That is where people lean forward. They recognise the pressures of the time, the work that filled the days, the skills people relied on, the compromises they made, the losses they experienced, the way change landed differently across households. Place returns to the centre of the story.

At that point, I see it each time I ask a simple question. Who here keeps stories? Hands rise. Photo albums. Letters tied with ribbon. Boxes in cupboards. A drawer nobody else opens. People understand the responsibility straight away.

One story I often share involves a suitcase. A man kept his family’s letters and photographs inside it. When he died, the suitcase passed to his son. The son treated it as something to look after. Inside were photographs of my own family I had never seen. My history survived through someone else’s care.

Experiences like this are common. They rarely get spoken about.

Today, that care can extend beyond cupboards and drawers. Digital spaces allow stories to travel. Ordinary lives become searchable and discoverable. A single record can reach families, researchers, and future generations who have yet to realise what they are looking for.

Each invitation I receive leads to a different conversation.

People want to hear about their own backyards. Their streets. Their arguments. Their decisions. Their innovations. They want to recognise themselves in the record.

What I bring to these conversations is a way of looking at history through lived experience. History shaped by choice, effort, and consequence. The facts still matter. Meaning travels alongside them when someone takes the time to carry it forward.