Category: Thought Leadership and Opinion

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.

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.

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.

Australia Day keeps circling the same argument and no one seems interested in finding a way through

Every January, the country walks back into the same argument.
The same positions.
The same anger.
The same sense everyone has said this before and nothing has shifted.

Australia Day is held on 26 January because it marks the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 and the beginning of British colonisation. This history sits at the centre of the debate. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, 26 January marks invasion, dispossession, and the beginning of harm that continues across generations. Calling it Invasion Day reflects lived experience rather than provocation.

At the same time, some Australians hold tightly to 26 January. For them, the date represents continuity and belonging. Changing it feels personal, as though something familiar is being taken away. Others move through the day without much thought beyond a public holiday, yet still find themselves pulled into an argument that demands a position.

What strikes me is how little effort goes into finding a way through this. Disagreement isn’t unusual in a country like ours.

What is unusual is how willing we are to let the issue sit unresolved. There’s no shared story about 26 January, no careful listening, no attempt to imagine a future that isn’t stuck replaying the same fight.

Instead, the debate gets funnelled into the same places each year. Social media. Talkback radio. Morning television. Volume replaces curiosity. Language sharpens. People dig in. By the end of January, many people feel bruised and unheard, and the country feels smaller rather than stronger.

From the outside, this reads less like a national conversation and more like neglect. Neglect of history. Neglect of people who carry its weight. Neglect of the responsibility that comes with living together on contested ground.

Other countries with difficult pasts have taken different approaches. They separate remembrance from celebration. They create space for truth to be spoken without rushing people toward agreement. They accept that shared life asks for patience and sustained attention over time.

Australia avoids that path. Australia steps around what living together requires. We argue about 26 January, defend our ground, and return to our corners. The deeper question rarely holds the centre.

What kind of country are we trying to be, and how do we want to live with each other?

Until that question leads the conversation, Australia Day will keep returning as a fault line. Each year it exposes the same cracks, not because the issue lacks answers, but because choosing the easier option has become routine.

And next January, the cycle will begin again.

When family love stops you from speaking up

I have been estranged from my family for twelve years.

I grew up knowing I had little in common with the family I was born into. Later, I married into another family where the same gap appeared. Years after that, my son married into a family where it surfaced again. The pattern repeats. Honesty stays close.

Tradition insists that DNA overrides everything else. In practice, it often overrides values, curiosity, and disagreement. Because of that, difference gets framed as risk rather than reality.

Estrangement carries grief. However, it also creates room to act.

Over the last twelve years, I have taken positions I would never have taken while managing family approval. I have worked publicly on social and environmental justice. I have challenged institutions. I have stayed with issues that attract pushback rather than praise. As a result, my life reflects what I believe rather than what others can tolerate.

That determination comes at a cost. Putting your head above the parapet is mentally demanding. It brings scrutiny, conflict, and sustained pressure. My family worried about that. They often framed their concern as care, stress, health, too much exposure, too much risk. Meanwhile, I experienced those same pressures as the price of doing work that mattered to the public, even when it unsettled people close to home.

Psychologists who work with estranged adults describe this pattern clearly. Karl Pillemer defines estrangement as intentional distancing in response to a relationship experienced as damaging. In contrast, Sherrie Campbell writes about families that rely on control and dismissal while presenting it as concern.

That framing shapes outcomes. It allows families to describe public action as recklessness and persistence as fragility. It also explains why attempts at staying connected often shrink into silence rather than dialogue.

I care about taking action on things that carry weight now. I accept the cost of being an outlier. I accept the strain without pretending it was avoidable.

DNA explains origin. It does not dictate alignment.

Twelve years on, the life built outside family approval carries coherence, agency, and direction. It is not a consolation prize. It is the point.

 

Graham Richardson. Whatever it takes and what it costs

When I was young, I thought Henry Kissinger was something special. He seemed calm, clever, powerful, the man everyone turned to when the world was on fire. The media made him sound like a hero. Only later did I learn about the secret bombings in Cambodia, the support for dictators, and the way real people paid the price for his so-called strategy. The shine came off pretty fast once you understood what those decisions meant for ordinary lives.

“Henry Kissinger is one of the worst people to ever be a force for good.”  Nicholas Thompson, editor of newyorker.com

Graham Richardson came later, but I was never a fan. Different stage, same play. He was the backroom operator who knew how to pull the strings, the man everyone said you had to have on your side. Yet somehow, despite all the questions and all the deals, he stayed above it all. The media made him a character, not a cautionary tale.

“There were no true believers in Richo’s world, only those who could deliver. It was effective, certainly, but it left behind a smaller kind of politics, one that taught us how easy it is to win the game and lose the point of playing it.”

It’s funny how age changes what you see. Back then, power looked impressive. Now I look at it and wonder who was writing the story, and why we all believed it. Instead of lifting public life, he made it narrower, more cynical, more about winning than governing.

In the end, the commentators probably summed him up best.

“Richo was the ultimate Labor numbers man,  brilliant, ruthless, and utterly transactional. He turned survival into an art form, always one step ahead of the fallout. To many, he made politics look like a business deal, where loyalty was negotiable and purpose optional. “

Addendum

News that Graham Richardson will be given a state funeral has stunned me  Honouring him in this way feels less like recognition of public service and more like confirmation of how skewed our political compass has become.

There was a time when state funerals were reserved for those who lifted the country, people whose contribution went beyond party or personal survival. Now it seems the test is different: power itself has become the virtue.

It’s not about denying grief or denying that he mattered to many. It’s about what we, as a nation, choose to honour. When a life spent mastering political deals is celebrated as public greatness, it tells us more about our leaders than about the man in the coffin.

For me, it’s another reminder of why integrity still matters, and why we need to keep asking the hard questions about who gets remembered, and what for.

Investigative reporter Kate McClymont’s story in SMH today 11 Nov 2025 is behind a paywall but it is so spot on it’s worth a subscription. ‘Long lunches, Swiss bank accounts and a kangaroo scrotum: My decades pursuing Graham Richardson”

#PowerAndPerception #MediaInfluence #Realpolitik #AustralianPolitics #GrahamRichardson #HenryKissinger #WhateverItTakes #PublicAccountability #LessonsFromHistory #CriticalThinking

 

 

 

You Don’t Have to Be Angry to Be Brave

This blog is a follow up to an earlier blog “When Advocacy Turns Dangerous: The Moment You Can’t Stay Silent”

Are you like me, someone who wants to speak up when you see or hear something unjust, but sometimes hesitates because you don’t want to make things worse, or make someone feel small?

That hesitation comes from care. Most of us don’t want to hurt people; we want to make things better. But we were never taught how. We were taught to keep the peace, not to have hard conversations with grace.

I recently watched Sarah Crawford-Bohl’s TED Talk How to Speak Up — Even When You Don’t Want To.

 She shows that courage and kindness can live in the same sentence. You can hold your ground without pushing someone else off theirs.

The Four Phrases That Can Change Any Difficult Conversation

It doesn’t take a big speech. Sometimes it’s the smallest phrases that shift the whole tone of a conversation:

  • Instead of “With respect…”, try “I see it differently.”

  • Instead of “That’s wrong.”, try “Can we look at that another way?”

  • Instead of “You can’t say that.”, try “That might land differently for some people.”

  • Instead of silence, try “I’m not sure that sits right with me.”

These simple swaps are powerful. They keep people in the conversation rather than shutting it down.

Why Teaching Kids How to Speak Up Might Be the Most Important Lesson of All

Even after years of negotiation training, I still catch myself slipping into an overly forceful tone when something matters to me. It’s hard to unlearn. But that’s exactly why this work matters, because if we can teach young people how to use their voices with strength and empathy, maybe they won’t have to spend years unlearning the habits we did.

It’s the same truth behind that short film Justice,  the moment when a teacher unfairly dismisses a student and everyone stays silent

and the playful How to Start a Movement clip, where the brave first follower turns one person’s awkward dance into a movement.

In both, the real change begins when someone chooses courage over comfort.

Speaking up doesn’t have to make anyone feel small. Done with care, it can make everyone in the room a little braver.

#SpeakUpKindly #EverydayActivism #CivicCourage #RespectfulCommunication #LeadershipStartsHere #EmpathyInAction #TeachThemYoung #ChangeTheConversation #FirstFollower #KindnessIsStrength

Are We All Living in a Socially Accepted Delusion?

 

We’ve normalised the idea that a stranger’s 30-second video can diagnose our personality, heal our trauma, or sell us peace of mind in a bottle. When enough people repeat it, it stops feeling ridiculous. It becomes a trend, which is just a delusion with good PR.

I’ve started noticing something interesting in a few novels lately: little acronyms like SAD and MAD popping up in unexpected ways. Not the usual meanings, of course. SAD becomes Socially Accepted Delusion. MAD turns into Mutually Accepted Delusion.

Writers love this device. Technically they’re acronyms, but when an author redefines them for a deeper or ironic purpose, it’s called a backronym, a phrase built around existing letters to create new meaning. It’s a small linguistic trick that can hold a big mirror up to society.

One of my favourite examples comes from The Detective by Matthew Reilly. His character muses that if a woman believes aliens live in her head, she’s sent to a mental institution, but if she believes Jesus lives in her head, she’s considered a person of deep faith. Both beliefs are invisible, yet one is sanctioned and the other condemned.

That’s the essence of a Socially Accepted Delusion: a belief that survives scrutiny because enough people share it.

Social norms can uplift, kindness as a default, recycling without being asked. But they can also disguise absurdities: buying things we don’t need to prove success, glorifying burnout as dedication, mistaking outrage for virtue. The line between belief and delusion isn’t always logic, it’s popularity.

We don’t have to look far to find new socially accepted delusions. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll see thousands of people declaring the latest miracle cure, wealth hack, or personality quiz that “changes everything.” We call it “content,” but it’s really crowdsourced conviction.

We’ve normalised the idea that a stranger’s 30-second video can diagnose our personality, heal our trauma, or sell us peace of mind in a bottle. When enough people repeat it, it stops feeling ridiculous. It becomes a trend, which is just a delusion with good PR.

Social media has turned SAD and MAD into a feedback loop: Socially Amplified Delusions and Massively Accelerated Denial. We don’t need facts, we need followers. And the algorithm happily feeds our favourite fantasies back to us. The more confident the lie, the faster it spreads.

The technology isn’t evil. The danger lies in what we stop questioning once something feels familiar, popular, or profitable.

Maybe the real test of sanity in the 21st century isn’t what we believe. It’s how often we pause to ask why.

#SociallyAcceptedDelusion #MatthewReilly #TheDetective #SocialNorms #TikTokCulture #MassDelusion #DigitalLife #CriticalThinking #ModernBeliefs #CulturalCommentary

How Australia Faced HIV With Courage and Compassion, and What We Can Learn Today

Some moments in history remind us who we can be at our best.

I’ve been reading Val McDermid’s novel  1989, and it sent me down a rabbit hole of memory and research. The book touches on the AIDS epidemic, that terrifying, uncertain time when a diagnosis felt like a death sentence, and I found myself remembering what it was like to be a pharmacist back then.

I can still see the face of the first person who came in with a script for one of the new HIV drugs. We had to order it through a special clinic, and everyone in the pharmacy treated that person with quiet respect. There was fear, yes, but there was also deep compassion. We knew we were standing in the middle of something history-making, even if we didn’t yet understand it.

Courage and compassion can change the course of a crisis.

Reading 1989 inspired me to dig deeper, and what I found filled me with pride. Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS was extraordinary. We didn’t look away. We listened to the science, worked with the people most affected, and refused to let stigma drive the response.

Australia listened, cared, and led — and the world noticed.

Under Bob Hawke’s Labor government, with Health Minister Neal Blewett at the helm, we built partnerships between government, doctors, and community groups like ACON.

When politics steps aside, progress steps forward.

We introduced needle exchange programs, ran bold public health campaigns, and made treatment and testing accessible to all. It wasn’t perfect, but it saved thousands of lives and became known worldwide as the Australian model.

Science mattered, but so did empathy.

I feel very strongly about the stigma that still surrounds gay relationships. The irony is that the same community that was hardest hit also became one of the strongest forces in fighting the epidemic, organising care, demanding research, and shaping prevention campaigns that ended up saving lives far beyond their own circle.

The people most affected became the ones who saved us all.

It struck me how different that felt to today. When COVID hit, we started strong, with the National Cabinet bringing everyone to the same table, but it didn’t take long for cooperation to crumble. The spirit that carried us through the HIV crisis, that sense of unity and shared purpose, feels much harder to find now.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see that kind of bipartisan leadership again? To see our political parties stop fighting each other long enough to work for the good of the country and its people. We’ve done it before, with courage, compassion, and respect, and 1989 reminded me we could do it again.

We’ve done it before. We can do it again

#Australia #HIVAIDS #PublicHealth #BobHawke #NealBlewett #ValMcDermid #1989 #LGBTQHistory #HealthLeadership #Compassion #BipartisanSupport #CommunityStrength #PharmacistLife

 

 

 

This Threat Can Destroy a Nation – And It Starts in Your Head

When enough people believe a dangerous idea, it can do more damage than any earthquake, flood, or fire.”Carl Jung once said:

“It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”

What he meant is simple but unsettling: our biggest threat doesn’t come from outside forces like famine or disease,  it comes from inside our own minds.

What’s a “psychic epidemic”?

Jung was talking about what happens when destructive ideas or emotions spread through a community or a nation. Think of it as mass hysteria, but on a much bigger scale. People start feeding off each other’s fear, anger, or prejudice until it snowballs into something far more dangerous than any one person could cause on their own.

History is full of examples: witch hunts, Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide. These didn’t happen because of earthquakes or floods, they happened because people’s minds got caught up in a destructive collective belief.

Why it’s worse than a natural disaster

If we face a flood, a fire, or a disease outbreak, we can often rebuild, treat, or protect against it. A psychic epidemic is different. There’s no vaccine. Once it takes hold, it can destroy trust, compassion, and reason. And unlike a virus, it can keep spreading long after the first outbreak.

The scars it leaves, mistrust, division, hatred, can last for generations.

“The most dangerous outbreaks don’t start in nature — they start in our own minds.”

The modern outbreak

Today, the tools that connect us can also spread dangerous ideas faster than ever. Social media algorithms push us toward outrage. Misinformation circulates in hours, not months. Conspiracy theories grow into movements.

We’ve built a world where ideas, good or bad, can go viral. And once they do, they can be hard to stop.

How we protect ourselves

We can’t put up a quarantine zone around human thought. But we can:

  • Slow down before we share or react.

  • Listen to different viewpoints, especially ones we don’t already agree with.

  • Teach and practise critical thinking.

  • Value respectful debate over point-scoring.

None of this is easy. But if Jung was right, then protecting ourselves from collective madness might be the most important public health measure we have.

Because the real danger isn’t just in the storms nature throws at us, it’s in what happens when our minds become the storm.

#DangerousIdeas #CollectiveThinking #MassPsychology #CarlJung #PsychicEpidemics #MindsMatter #CriticalThinking #TruthMatters #SocialAwareness #MindsetShift