Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians is a fraught topic, presenting legal as well as moral challenges, and involves a large set of issues beyond my scope here. I want to explore in this chapter the problem of how to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, a matter given much thought by the members of the Expert Panel appointed by Prime Minister Gillard in December 2010
In this chapter I will be discussing the role of the media in a liberal democracy, and the tension between the essential free flow of information in a free society and the accountability which all power, including media power, must be subjected to for a society to be truly free
When I was a little girl, I was taught a song about a ball of white string, in which the white string could fix everything — tie a bow on a gift, fly a kite, mend things. The second verse of the song was about all the things that string cannot fix — broken hearts, mend friendships — the list goes on. In all of the research I have been doing about Artificial Intelligence (AI), its governance and what it can do, this song has frequently come to mind
The term diabetes mellitus is derived from Greek and Latin words meaning excessive discharge of urine (diabetes), which is honey sweet (mellitus). The disease diabetes mellitus was first described as early as 1500 BC by physicians from Egypt and India, who noticed the sweet or honey water in the urine of people with diabetes attracting ants
The Human Rights Commission notes that there are rights protected by international treaties for which it has local responsibility, as well as a broader range of human rights as understood by the community. Among those is the right to a healthy environment. Protecting the natural world has impacts on our health, our mental wellbeing, our ability to produce the food we eat and the water we drink, as well as the spiritual comfort we draw from our surroundings
When I was born, the human population was about two billion. Today, it is approaching seven billion. In the 1960s, US biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of the consequences of uncontrolled population growth. In forecasting mass starvation if the population continued to grow, he was echoing the gloomy thoughts of Malthus, who argued over 200 years ago that population was increasing faster than food production could be expanded
In 1989, I wrote a book on climate change, Living in the Greenhouse. At the time the scientific community was still divided about climate change. It was clear that the planet was getting warmer and that other changes were happening, like rising sea levels and altered rainfall patterns
Scientific understanding of the world has enabled us to improve material wellbeing on a scale that previous generations would find difficult to believe. For all but the last few decades, most humans have struggled to obtain the basic necessities for a civilised life: clean water, sanitation, adequate nutrition, shelter and health care
City planning is now recognised as an important part of a compre-hensive solution to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). By 2050, some 75% of the world’s population will live in cities. Almost 80% of Australians already reside in Australia’s major cities, as a result of population movements from rural areas to urban centres since the turn of the 20th century
The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. Such is its complexity, that even the number of brain cells (neurons) within it remains in dispute, with common estimates ranging from between 86 billion to over 100 billion. Each of these cells forms multiple connections, called synapses, with its neighbouring neurons, with perhaps 125 trillion of these connections existing in the cortex, or surface layer of the brain, alone