South Wind

“I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand that it is with this sorrow that we as a nation will grow, and seek a better, a fairer, and a wiser future.”

That was John Howard in a national telecast on the eve of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Not the one in the Lodge who had refused to offer any such apology, but an actor of the same name reading a script written by John Clarke for a comic TV “documentary” called The Games.

Years later, in the finest moment of his political career, prime minister Kevin Rudd expressed “profound sorrow” to Australia’s Indigenous people in the Australian parliament. But despite its global notoriety for having rounded up Aboriginal inhabitants and shipped them to Flinders Island, Tasmania, or Lutruwita, didn’t rate a mention in that speech.

In December 2016, Will Hodgman’s Liberal government looked like making amends for that omission, backing plans to acknowledge Australia’s frontier wars and honour the world’s oldest living culture.

The founder of Mona, David Walsh, and its creative director Leigh Carmichael teamed up with Aboriginal writer Greg Lehman to produce a plan for a National Truth and Reconciliation Art Park at Macquarie Point.

Walsh said at the time that as one of the “whitefellas treading on blackfella graves” he wanted “to find a way through” the fog of the standard settlement narrative. “It will be easy enough to find fault and to criticise. But we’ve done nothing for far too long, and continuing to do nothing will only make things worse for everybody, invaders and indigenes alike.”

Carmichael said Macquarie Point could be the site of Australia’s first major public acknowledgment for a part of our history “that no one wants to talk about, but ultimately made us who we are”. Lehman said Macquarie Point could be “a catalyst for change… a positive example not just for Australia, but for the world.”

The $240,000 study, funded by the Hodgman government, envisaged an expansive “art park”, plus an information centre and a fire and light installation, celebrating 40,000 years of Tasmanian culture.

Will Hodgman called it “bold and brilliant”. Suggesting that the park could also acknowledge the site’s original wetland habitat, a Mercury reader said that “Macquarie Point can become a place of healing and a beacon of hope for the future.”

Such moments in history need to be seized. Inspired by John Clarke’s sentiment that “we as a nation will grow” by acknowledging past missteps, we might have latched on to a remarkable feature of our past: that long before humans penetrated South America, for 20,000 or so years this island marked the southernmost reach of humankind.

In 2021 things were still ticking over. The Macquarie Point Development Corporation (MPDC) and the Aboriginal community had put together a “co-design group”, and Hodgman’s successor, Peter Gutwein, tabled in parliament a landmark report, “Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty”.

But ahead of his April 2022 resignation, Gutwein had also started a push for a Tasmanian AFL team. Visiting AFL executives took a liking to Macquarie Point, and in September 2022 new premier Jeremy Rockliff made a stadium on the point his pet project.

The national truth and reconciliation memorial became an “Aboriginal Culturally Informed Zone”. The co-design group objected that the narrow strip between Davey Street and the stadium proposed for this wouldn’t work, and members quit.

Which is where we are today, as the ground at Macquarie Point is being prepared for the young gods to grace our capital with their occasional winter-time presence. I remain of the view that Macquarie Point is the wrong place for the stadium, but it was parliament’s decision, and it’s done.

This can’t be allowed to rest here. Our island community is duty-bound to fill this yawning gap in its narrative. The project put together by Lehman, Carmichael and Walsh is lost, but we can’t allow their vision to disappear down the cracks, or between Davey Street and the stadium.

Australian football has strong Indigenous connections going back to colonial times if not beyond. Aboriginal athletes, male and female, have brought their culture into the game and enriched it with their sublime skills. There must be ways, more than one, of bringing together this real, living phenomenon and the imperative to get our origin story out there.

Our continuing failure to recognise this island’s ancient Indigenous culture has become a running sore in the Tasmanian community. So too is the stadium. Bringing them together into a single nationally-significant project might be the healing balm we need.

One frantic year into what is shaping as a momentous four-year term (if that’s all it is), the world is now wide awake to what it’s like having Donald Trump make play with the most powerful economic and military force in history. It’s not pretty, but it sure has everyone’s attention.

Trump’s imperial America is on the march. Its empire is measured by economic reach and bolstered by a military capable of rapid deployment anywhere – the kind of force that snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their Caracas bunker ten days ago.

Trump and acolytes like Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, are triumphant. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Miller said after the raid, “but we live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

This is Trump’s America, as the president’s own border police snatch people they deem to be illegal immigrants off streets and out of homes and workplaces, handcuff them and send them into detention, who knows where. Even in America with its violent history, this is new.

The Caracas raid has set the scene for the rest of Trump’s second term, and it’s coloured black. He says America will “take back the oil… we should’ve taken back a long time ago” – a reference to when Venezuela sent US oil companies packing by nationalising the industry in 2007.

Venezuela’s heavy crude is hard to extract and handle, which is not lost on those American companies resisting Trump’s efforts to get them back there. But there’s a bigger issue in play. A ramped-up Venezuelan industry would be a major global source of carbon pollution.

For Trump and the oil executives he met last week, that’s irrelevant. With the world teetering on the brink of unstoppable global warming they have always shown contempt for science and humanity’s wellbeing. Their mantra: Make America great, bugger the planet.

Which brings us to the world’s biggest island.

Historically no-one wanted to know about Greenland, buried under more than a mile of ice, except the handful of Inuit and Norse people who found ways to live there. Three centuries ago Denmark took it on as a colony (now self-governing) and when the nuclear age began it allowed the US as a NATO ally to operate military bases there.

The melting of Greenland ice is now accelerating at a rate that would see global sea levels rise over a metre this century. That would inundate low-lying coastal land including Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Largo.

Blind to such a prospect, Trump sees the vanishing ice as a chance to extract mineral wealth while enlarging his empire. He intends to take Greenland, by force if necessary.

In the strongman’s simple world, bigger is always better. Greenland won’t be enough for Trump, and his next target is right next door. Canada is even larger than the US itself. Along with Greenland it would make the US the world’s biggest country. How tantalising is that?

Strongman leaders don’t like having their style cramped by others’ rules, so Trump despises the United Nations. Ironically it was America that in 1945 led the quest for world security. Besides providing the UN with its New York headquarters it seed-funded agencies for peacekeeping, protecting the vulnerable, fighting disease and growing food.

Since the 1980s the UN has also supported climate science, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Branding this science as false, Trump now seeks to silence it. Last week he formally withdrew his country from both the IPCC and the 33-year-old bedrock treaty that underpins global climate action.

Trump’s removal of UN guardrails, added to his defunding of science, his territorial ambitions and his exercise of raw power at home and abroad endangers everyone. While the man-boy has his fun with guns and oil, the world is rushing headlong towards self-immolation. In strongman language, that’s betrayal on a planetary scale.

This imposes new responsibilities on all Western democracies including Australia. We need to heed Mark Carney, prime minister of our close Commonwealth sibling Canada, the country most at risk from Trumpian imperialism. He warned several times in 2025 that the old order of things has gone and we must now fashion a new one.

All democracies must redefine their alliance with the US, and their leaders including Anthony Albanese must talk about this, publicly.

We are sailing in uncharted, shark-infested waters. We should all be afraid, and we should all be furious.

Video has long been my go-to place for first-hand information and direct quotes on things of interest, but recently I’ve had several rude awakenings when video clips I’d taken to be genuine turned out to be complete fakes.

And like a contagious disease, the fakes appear in greater numbers in your YouTube viewing list the more you click on them. What was once a reliable source of verifiable information on contentious subjects is no longer.

I was confident I had the skills and experience to pick a fake a mile away, but decades in journalism and government service didn’t prepare me for online life today. We’re now at the disconcerting point where AI video tools, aided and abetted by social media viewing algorithms, can drag us unknowing into complete fantasy.

Human contact is the stock-in-trade of journalists (as it is of everyone if only everyone knew), but for it to work as it should we need to know that the people we see are real and that what they say came from them. In a trigger-happy world fake videos created by bad actors can bring disaster.

The criteria for picking fake from real are constantly changing. The first fakes I came upon were low-resolution, blurry and grainy, a dead giveaway. But as passing time keeps reminding us, AI technology is getting more proficient at creating fakes, making it easier and cheaper to convince users that black is actually white.

All this is happening because there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The US online journal Axios quotes a senior partner at Menlo Ventures picturing 2026 as AI’s “show me the money” year, along with the prediction from James Brundage, head of EY’s Global and Americas Technology Sector, that “boards will stop counting tokens and pilots and start counting dollars.”

Well, yes. When they’re not theorising or visualising, counting money is what boards do, and what they expect from their minions.

And no-one got sacked for breezy optimism, like OpenAI’s head of applications, Fidji Simo. She believes that we’ll soon have AI “constantly running in the background, getting things done for us across the web and the real world … We’ll be able to trust it to make decisions and take action on our behalf,” she says.

Of course – just like we knew to trust those used car salesmen back in the last century.

As the 21st century grinds on, it may be that most of AI’s exponentially growing range of tasks will be for everyone’s great benefit. But many of them will not, and like those blurry videos showing the bombing of boats allegedly being used by Venezuelan drug smugglers we may never be able to verify their authenticity.

The media conference at the weekend in the wake of the US military’s smash-and-grab raid in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, led by the master of fakery, Donald Trump, was in hindsight most striking for what was not talked about.

For a change, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t get a look in. Weeks of questions about Trump’s past connections with the child sex trafficker suddenly ceased. Instead it was all about the raid: a triumphant show of US military brilliance made possible by the strength and courage of the man at the top. He couldn’t have wished for a better political distraction.

But the Caracas raid has opened up a whole new can of worms. If instead of his usual hearsay he’d absorbed a bit of real history – say, the history of Iraq around 2004 – he might have understood that forcing a new regime on a major country isn’t at all like appointing a new company CEO. So the master of misinformation might also turn out to be its victim too.

Politics and the truth have always had a loose relationship. The combination of an authoritarian president, vested interests everywhere you look and AI online sludge are reason to question the truth of everything we see and hear in public media, an absence of trust that adds to the burden of daily life.

Nine months ago a plausible, detailed research paper titled AI 2027, predicting the arrival of artificial general intelligence by 2027, explored its likely progression before bypassing humanity altogether. “If we’re on the cusp of superintelligence, society is nowhere near prepared,” it concluded.

But when were we ever prepared for any historic change?

If you’ve scratched yourself lately you’ll realise that real life is not online. This article may be in front of you in an unchangeable form, in print on paper you can touch. If so, allow yourself a moment to celebrate glorious reality.