Today my guests is Donnie Maclurcan, Executive Director of Project Australia, a national organisation helping people launch ideas that seek to create positive social change within communities.
Donnie tells me how the idea came together, how it all works, and what they are trying to do. He’s a terrific example of someone who has taken the bit between his teeth and is putting action behind the dream of a better country.
If you’re wondering about the new intro music, it’s Dies Irae from Mozart’s REQUIEM, a favourite of mine. The lyrics actually come from an old Catholic hymn which starts off:
Dies iræ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla!
Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophets’ warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
I love the piece of music (one of my dreams has always been to put together an annual live performance of it) and the lyrics are kind of fitting, don’t you think?
China has censorship. Australia has censorship. Ours may be less strict and more sophisticated, but if you want to argue against the principle of censorship, let’s fight it at home first. I’ll be there with you. Let’s just avoid the mass hysteria and hypocrisy of criticizing easy targets when we have similar laws at home. That’s just the way the mass media and governments deflect attention from what is happening in our own backyards.
Australia has laws about what and can’t be said. So does China. And China isn’t going to change until the people of China was it to and do something about it en masse.
If Australia REALLY wants to protest China’s human rights record, let’s boycott the Olympics. We could also stop selling them coal but I suspect economic sanctions hurt innocent civilians more than the people in power. However let’s stop censorship at home first, then perhaps we’ll be in a position to critique other countries.
the spoof website MiningNSW which the Mining Council of NSW has been trying to shut down
and then I finish with a little chat about my friend, the darkness, and what to do about it.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – Aussies can dial into +613 9016 9699. The rest of you can either pay international charges (cmon, what price can you put on being on my show??) or just start begging me to set up an international number.
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I was just preparing to record a show on Ezra Pound, perhaps the most influential poet of the 20th century, when I came across this site, which used to carry copies of some of Pound’s best works.
On the site, you can read this recent announcement:
Canto I
by: Ezra Pound
Copyright law was designed to be a temporary monopoly on ideas granted to artists because we felt it would encourage them to enrich our lives with their creations.
This page used to have a very nice poem. However, we just received the email reproduced below from the agents of the estate of Ezra Pound. It seems that the poem is still in copyright, and they would prefer that it remain a salable commodity item, instead of becoming part of our culture. Sometime in the middle of the century, if Ezra Pound is still relevant to your life, you can make “Canto I” part of it.
If however, you think that copyright law has been hijacked by dirt bag lawyers and no longer serves the public interest, you might throw a few dollars at the EFF and let them know that you support their efforts to bring it back under control. But frankly, the lawyers of the copyright barons are much better funded, and will probably just keep turning the screws until “intellectual property” monopolies last forever, and your kids just assume that ideas have always been owned.
Pound died in 1972. Apparently his poems are now dead also. A shame. And to think he was once imprisoned and thrown into an asylum in the U.S. for being a fascist. Oh the irony. The poem I was going to read was written in 1920.
So by the end, they (MSNBC) were ordering us, if we booked one guest that was anti-war, we had to book two that were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to have three on the right. At one meeting a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and she was told for ideological balance she would need three right-wingers. It became more of a nightmare, as the war got closer; and then we all got terminated three weeks before the invasion was launched, and it was purely political.
“You can educate the people about what is happening in the world, but you can’t ever go to impose a will which is not their own,â€
– Venezuelan-U.S. Attorney, Eva Golinger, author of new book, Bush vs. Chavez: Washington’s War Against Venezuela (Monte Avila Editores, 2006, Caracas).
Q. How has Microsoft Australia demonstrated that it is innovative?
A. Microsoft Australia values innovation very highly both internally and also in terms of our engagement in the local economy. ….. ……..
Another good example has been the joint venture that Microsoft sponsored with PBL to create the start-up company NineMSN which has been an innovative and successful new company in Australia.
.. Microsoft Australia CEO Steve Vamos. My spies at Microsoft Australia don’t agree with that statement. I keep getting told that most of the innovative people have left the company in the last few years and that the company is getting more and more like IBM every day. NineMSN is an example of innovation? Jamming together Australia’s biggest media giant with the world’s largest software company nine years ago?
Steve also mentioned Victoria.Net which (I believe) was the idea of one of my old managers, David Sajfar. Great idea for bringing together Microsoft’s developers in the local market but… cmon… it’s a portal. Those two things were Steve’s top examples of local Microsoft innovation? A nine-year old JV with Packer and a portal? Sheesh. Buy Google stock.
