Sarah Jansen | Writer | Editor | Web Geek

November is the month Arts Queensland wants to hear from you about the future of the department’s support for our state’s design community.

Starting on Friday, Arts Minister Rod Welford be consulting Queenslanders for a whole month on what we think about building a Queensland Centre for Design. It will be interesting to see what this consultation entails.

The proposed centre will be charged with:

strengthening Queensland's design industry and raising the profile of state designers by creating an internationally recognised hub for the varied design disciplines.

Whoa. I kind of feel sorry for it already.

That’s a lot to ask of one centre servicing a state with a population of around 4 million and a pretty terrible recent history of supporting those with a creative bent.

Whatever the outcome, it will be great to see some government support of our design community, from the interior and furniture designers, to creators of gorgeous vases and bowls, not to mention those who specialise in lamps and light fittings, and even ceiling fans. Seriously.

With the resignation of their lawyer, it is now up to the Bali Bombers themselves to appeal their death sentences.

They’re not going to of course, but that seems to be something that the Australian media and the families of the bombers’ victims are determined to ignore.

The recent calls for Australia to legalise polygamy to accommodate the country’s Muslim community have sparked some interesting discussions in the media.

There have been a lot of statements about the issue of polygamy — a word that covers both multiple wives and multiple husbands — and how it relates to the “Australian way of life”. One camp says it threatens or is counter to it and therefore should not even be considered. The other camp says that it is rare for Australian Muslims anyway and that there are polygamous marriages here already so making it legal wouldn’t threaten anything.

No one is talking about what the Australian way of life actually is, and why it is feeling so threatened.