It seems as though tips are expected now – even when the service is bad and restaurant wages are liveable.

Nauru is in such a parlous state of dysfunction that New Zealand has just announced it is no longer willing to fund its justice system. Staff who report the abuse are sacked and medical staff now confront the threat of a two-year jail sentence for reporting the abuse of women and children. I am worried we have that we have become a country that denies people their basic human rights.

We seem to be obsessed with them and I wonder if this speaks to our national character

Viewed from an economic perspective, does the arts suffer from something similar to the military-industrial complex, minus the extreme violence? It seems like everyone in the arts think that more funding will fix all our problems. I was thinking of this in the light of ever growing artistic output and too much choice that the inner city life has to offer, and the idea that art is like violence in the sense that it will continue to be practiced impulsively by humans regardless of funding. To me, what seems to motivate reasonable decisions and priorities as governments struggle to allocate resources justly is the education and learning environment people have access to rather than the size of our arts or “defence” budget.

I can’t understand why there is so little interest in the republican debate. Is it because it doesn’t matter? We should all have a keen interest because it is at the heart of us being an independent country.

Living with mental illness (my own and that of my husband), I am bombarded with jingoistic slogans like ‘R U OK?’, parroted by gurus of ‘Mindfulness’, and by their minions who wave yellow balloons in my face, or consultants who advise employers to host endless parties, or feign empathy in exchange for docility, or friends who assume we need an ideological revamp. If wellbeing crusaders really cared how we felt, they would be quieter and let us have our contemplation; or ask a complete sentence with rounded vowels, including the last two letters of ‘you’. If a person cannot ask ‘How are you feeling?’ without abbreviating it into an acronym, clearly they have no time to hear us. If we had the power to define mental health, perhaps it would differ from current expectations? Who would the ‘sick’ ones be then?

In the mid 1970’s I heard a bureaucrat [Bob Lansdowne] argue that social change came from shifts in compassion or compulsion-he was discussing our relationship with Indonesia and argued that compassion was in short supply. He was suggesting that huge disparities in income and wealth in an increasingly open and global environment were a recipe for instability and conflict–and that we should be afraid of the consequences of failing to address it. His concern is even more relevant today.

If we all tapped away at pianos rather than computers, maybe we’d all be happier.

How is it that humans can experience such strong, conflicting, emotions at once? Does everyone experience this? Is it possible to pay attention to just one?

I have used marijuana for over 45 years. I use it responsibly and I have never had a bad experience with it. Why should I have to break the Law to have a quiet smoke in my own home on my own land? Why as a responsible adult can I not choose what is best for my life?