{"id":1869,"date":"2007-01-25T21:52:49","date_gmt":"2007-01-25T21:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2007-01-25T22:00:35","modified_gmt":"2007-01-25T22:00:35","slug":"australias-shames-on-its-national-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1869","title":{"rendered":"Australia’s shames on its national day"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reported 84 per cent increase in confirmed child abuse cases<\/a> in Australia is, apparently perversely, good news, in that this is being attributed to better reporting.<\/p>\n

But then there’s this:<\/p>\n

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were again overrepresented, with figures showing them to be five times as likely as other children to be the subject of a substantiated claim, more than six times as likely to be subject to care and protection orders, and more than seven times as likely to be in out-of-home care.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And reflecting Australia’s dismal record on the environment – even worse on carbon emissions than the US – a star Australian scientist<\/a> has been poached by California – attracted he says by the chance to really make a difference, which seems impossible in Australia.<\/p>\n

But there is some good news: Tim Flannery has been named Australian of the Year<\/a>. He’s the author of the brilliant The Future Easters<\/i>, which asserted that the aborigines and other Pacific humans had begun the apparently inexorable degradation of the fragile ecosystems of the region (a thesis backed by recent fossil discoveries<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I interviewed him many years ago and was immediately struck that he was one of those very few people with an absolutely original brain. His thesis then was that Australia as a continent had a sustainable carrying capacity of less than 4 million people. (The population is now 20 million.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reported 84 per cent increase in confirmed child abuse cases in Australia is, apparently perversely, good news, in that this is being attributed to better reporting. But then there’s this: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were again overrepresented, with figures showing them to be five times as likely as other children to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-politics","category-politics","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}