“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin once said. I hear you comrade. It feels as if three decades worth of events have happened in the past three years. 

Maybe that’s why I can’t stop listening to music from the 1990s. Not because the 90s is fashionable again, but because nothing much happened in that decade. Yes, I know we had the recession we had to have in the early 90s (if you were not alive or not living in Australia at the time, research quotes from our erstwhile prime minister, Paul Keating), but I was young and its impact on me was minimal. Less so than the death of a rockstar that shattered me, and the death of a princess that shocked me. Despite those “where were you when?” moments, the 90s felt real and free. As we entered the new millennium (and the world was not thrown into chaos by Y2K), I could not have imagined the surreal and confining events that would happen 20 years later. And I don’t just mean COVID-19. So much has happened. Much of it terrible, unless you are a fan of sporting teams named after big cats. 

Now, just as we seem to be rounding the pandemic corner, we face the recession we absolutely do not want to have. Standard media commentary has us in recession after two consecutive quarters of negative growth in real GDP. But even the Reserve Bank of Australia thinks that definition is flawed. So, who knows? We do know the RBA is attempting that old trick of controlling inflation by raising interest rates. That is, and will continue, to hurt. 

The state of our nation is not great, but what about the state of our fundraising nation? 

Read what our incredible fundraisers have to say and then proceed to page 48: “There has been no better time than now to work for purpose-driven organisations.” I hear you Owen Valentine Pringle, and I hope you do too.

CLARE JOYCE, Content Director