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| Image Courtesy The Echo |
Kerry O'Brien's Thea Astley address at the Byron Bay's writer's festival on Saturday 15th August is a pretty good diagnosis of what ails our country in 2016.
His address is introduced by Richard Flanagan and is described ain the official programme thus - "In lessons from history Kerry traces traces the two revolutions that have shaped the perfect storm we now find ourselves in - the digital tsunami and neoliberalism - that have seriously undermined the democracy we've taken for granted since federation".
He's not wrong.
You can read extracts from the address here published in the Echo, but I'll take a few quotes to give you idea of what he's on about, in case you don't have the time to listen to the whole address which takes about an hour.
He covered both neoliberalism and digitisation, describing the first of these two as "The ideology that has driven and coerced government as we once knew it to make itself smaller, privatise its services, nobble the trade unions - which have been one of humanity's great civilising forces - and cede the dominant role in determining the kind of society we want to be to the free market and the alleged freedom of the individual, rather than the imperative of the common good".
He described the social media phenomenon that has developed on the back of digitisation as "rapid, personalised, global, more accessible, largely ungoverned, and is far more widely opened to toxic manipulation and the perpetration of evil".
He's nailed it; as he always did as a working journalist.
