How Good Are Humans

Feminism achieved colossal triumphs in the 19th and 20th centuries after fierce battles for legal, social and economic equalities. The right to vote, the right to work, the right to divorce, the right to equal pay and freedom from sexual exploitation were a handful of important wins for Australian society. In the modern western world, it could be argued the great injustices have been corrected, or have they not? 

Despite what w...

Humans need stories. We are stories, each of us, and some of our stories are so great they've been written down. Others have invented stories, be they allegorical or pure fiction, for no reason more than brewing and spilling another provocative and entertaining piece to our cultural ether. 

But no story is guaranteed permanence. In fact, almost all are guaranteed the opposite. It takes a librarian to preserve them, and sometime...

Bridges, roads and railways don't just appear out of thin air, and the government doesn't walk around tossing wads of cash into a city's letterbox. Someone has to not only ask for it, but put their reputation on the line by pointing out where billions of dollars in domestic and International investment will be best spent. An economy, therefore, relies on those who can best advocate for it.

Jennifer Spilsbury, CEO of Advance Cairns a...

It's a tough time to become a politician in Australia. Housing supply is short and prices are high, the climate is changing but society still can't agree why or what to do about it, cost of living is on everyone's minds every day and AI is about to take all our jobs and maybe even exterminate us for good measure. Who do we consistently blame for our problems? Politicians. While they may deserve part of the blame, they're expected t...

Starting a gym routine can be confusing and daunting. Many people still believe a gym is only good for stripping weight or getting uselessly buff, that real fitness is not built under barbells. Even if a newbie takes a courageous step into a gym, it could be just days before they're demotivated by the bewildering array of machines or the intimidating presence of god-like figures walking here and there in muscle singlets or scrunch ...

Warren Entsch served in Australia's federal parliament for almost three decades. He worked with half a dozen Prime Ministers and witnessed the passage of some of the nation's greatest shifts in social and economic policy.

He was an entrenched backbencher with an outsized influence and outsized opinions. He stood against enraged gun owners in his own community after the Port Arthur massacre, he brushed off demands to scrap mentions o...

Anna Middleton was elected as the Division 7 councillor to Cairns Regional Council in 2024 as an unaligned and independent candidate with a low budget, grassroots effort, beating other candidates with more cash and more recognisable names. Since her election, she has leant on the expertise of industry professionals, scientists and experienced public servants to guide her decisions in the council chamber — an evidence-based ap...

Mike Atkinson is an adventurer and film maker who was a finalist on the first season of Alone Australia. He has had a career in the military as an aviator and survival instructor and has since turned his attention to completing extraordinary feats of adventure and survival while telling stories of the Australian environment. 

He has recently campaigned against government overreach that affects how everyday Australians enjoy the...

To walk into Coles or Woolworths is a step into a foreign land. Row upon row, aisle upon aisle, an abundance of food, will sit before our eyes. Some, maybe most of it, has been grown or produced in Australia, but nearly all of did not originate here. Its native lands are across the seas.

Before 1788, Australia was a nation with its own food sustaining a continent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples. Then the colonisation ...

If professional sporting success was a 100m racetrack, the starting blocks being discovery of the sport and the finish line being a major sports contract, the track ahead would appear totally different for a young girl compared to the track for a young boy. The boys' track would be flat and open; they would just have to focus on beating the others crouched on their left and right. The stadium would be packed with spectators and the...

Dining out can be the most delightful, satiating experience of our week, or our most disappointing. We all know the feeling of being promised the world on a menu but discovering we’ve been catfished when the plate arrives. Many of us have sweated over finding a satisfying first date restaurant. Almost all of us just want to find the perfect coffee, which can seem like chasing the end of a rainbow.
Well, business isn’...

Finding mental health support can be an expensive, inaccessible and intimidating experience. This experience is additionally difficult for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. And men are doggedly reluctant to seek out health services, let alone mental health services, until the last safe moment; sometimes, not until it's too late. Indigenous children are witnessing family breakdowns and domestic violence on an alarming s...

When an economy has a lot of potential to grow, but is also stalked by a fair risk of stall and decline, it takes experienced thought leaders, regional development experts and policy wonks to gently, or firmly, guide decision makers to steer the economic vehicle into the correct lane.

Professor Hurriyet Babacan is such a person, and has the resumé, intellect and drive to lay social and economic development plans at the feet of gover...

For more than 40 years Brian Cassey has watched suffering, tragedy, hope, elation and thrill through a few curved glass elements, waiting for moments of greatest importance and nearest perfect illumination to manifest. When they do, he stamps them into history via a 35mm grouping of pixels. The next morning, the moments are tossed onto your doorstep where you unfurl them in the calm of your home. Meanwhile, Brian is still at the ep...