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Vol 21 No 19

26 September 2011


 

  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Student journalism's gift to Eureka Street

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 07 October 2011
    2 Comments

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Insanity rules after ten years of war in Afghanistan

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 07 October 2011
    12 Comments

    Today is the tenth anniversary of the war on Afghan jihadists. We civilised Westerners decided we’d had enough of barbarians flying planes into our skyscrapers, killing thousands of our civilians. And hence we sent our own planes to drop huge bombs on their villages and towns.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Student journalism's gift to Eureka Street

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 07 October 2011

    In the Australian media landscape, Eureka Street is countercultural, giving space to younger writers such as Ellena Savage. She edited Melbourne University's student newspaper Farrago in 2010, following a range of luminaries including Geoffrey Blainey, Morag Fraser, Lindsay Tanner, Kate Legge, Christos Tsiolkas and Nam Le.

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  • RELIGION

    The moral ambiguity of free speech

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 October 2011
    34 Comments

    Andrew Bolt’s article was simply an egregious example of morally bad communication. It was indefensible on ethical grounds. Indeed, those who defended his right to free speech generally implied that public discussion is an ethics free zone.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Colour, culture and freedom of identity

    • Brian McCoy
    • 06 October 2011
    17 Comments

    I am deeply proud of my Aboriginal friend, who is now a doctor. I have not had the heart to tell her that once she was judged for not being dark enough to be awarded an Indigenous scholarship. While Andrew Bolt argues about freedom of speech, I argue about freedom of identity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Australia's suburban revolution

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 October 2011

    The redevelopment of Melbourne's St Kilda Triangle was pursued with little regard for community concerns. The Triangle Wars is a story of democracy undermined, then reasserted, as 'the people' rise to confront a government that has lost sight of the interests of those they are supposed to represent.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Atheist critic blind to current religious symbols

    • Rod Pattenden
    • 05 October 2011
    12 Comments

    Controversial Fairfax art critic John McDonald is scathing in his assessment of the 60th Blake Prize for Religious Art. His frustrated search for traditional religious symbols in the works reveals a lack of understanding of the role of images within Australia’s living religious imagination.

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  • CARTOON

    Market forces

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 05 October 2011

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My brother ill and illuminated

    • Brian Doyle
    • 05 October 2011
    7 Comments

    One time my brother Kevin and our father had a fistfight. Our sister herded the kids into a back room, made us kneel and pray. We could hear crashing; sometimes I still hear crashing when I pray. In his 50s Kevin, who I loved but sometimes disliked, got sick. It looks like he will die before Christmas.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Super concessions rob the poor to pay the rich

    • Lin Hatfield Dodds
    • 04 October 2011
    11 Comments

    A third of taxpayer-funded superannuation concessions — around $10 billion a year — are directed to the top 5 per cent of income earners. People living on or below the poverty line get no such support. This week's Tax Forum must ask: Are we proud of how we redistribute our national wealth?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Amoral accountant

    • Maria Takolander
    • 04 October 2011

    Talk of morality is bad for rationality ... it's a derailment-factor, a self-sabotager, a barbecue-stopper, plain un-Australian ... I can help you leverage your life-goals, so that you can experience real change with improved results.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A fair go for all means a higher GST

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 October 2011
    11 Comments

    The GST appears unfair, as it hits the poor much harder than it does the wealthy. But that's due to the way it is implemented, and it doesn't need to be that way. The St Vincent de Paul Society would like to see it increased, but with a more sophisticated and fairer compensation mechanism.

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  • MEDIA

    Uprooting fake online activism

    • Fatima Measham
    • 03 October 2011
    7 Comments

    Much marketing deceives. The problem with the fake grassroots activism known as astroturfing is that it artificially inflates numbers to provide a semblance of legitimacy. This is why it has become the strategy of choice for propagating fringe views such as climate denialism.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Trashing American English

    • Brian Matthews
    • 30 September 2011
    5 Comments

    Few dump masters are as erudite as Steve. 'Had a bloke here the other day, a Yank. Said he was after a couple of barrels. "You mean drums," I says. But no. He didn't want to play the bloody drums, he wanted barrels. Well, I says, the only barrels round here are wine barrels. What you want is drums.'

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  • MEDIA

    Bolt beyond the pale

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 30 September 2011
    36 Comments

    The Federal Court found that fair-skinned Aboriginal people were likely to have been 'offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated' by Bolt's articles. Bolt lamented the passing of free speech in Australia. But free speech cuts both ways, and no freedom is absolute.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Watching Athens crumble

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 September 2011
    4 Comments

    Two weeks ago two grandmothers met at a popular rendezvous in central Athens. Their talk was the usual leapfrog business, but there was an undercurrent of worry: What was going to happen to this country? Was any sort of solution going to present itself? Suddenly the riot squad hove into view.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Testing nature vs nurture

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 September 2011
    5 Comments

    During the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim was placed with and raised by a human family, with the aim of seeing whether he could learn language. On a larger canvas the experiment asked the question, 'how much can we make Nim human?'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Single mum's housing hell

    • Debi Hamilton
    • 28 September 2011
    14 Comments

    She is a beautiful, understated woman. She lives in a rented house where, four years ago, she nursed her husband while he died. Since then, she has been raising three children there by herself. One day, the owner turned up at the door and told her he was selling.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Revelations of a detention centre spy

    • Lyn Bender
    • 28 September 2011
    12 Comments

    Employed at the centre as a psychologist, I witnessed riots, hunger strikes, attempted suicides and severe depression. I realised I had a profound ethical dilemma: in being compliant to the administration, I was unable to ensure my duty of care towards these people. So I became a mole.

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  • CARTOON

    Sports hooked on pokies

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 28 September 2011
    1 Comment

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    'We will decide who comes here'

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 27 September 2011
    2 Comments

    It might be an epitaph on a tombstone, or an ancient call to prayer ... Forget the ancestral trespassers, the heritage forbears, the gin and bitters people. They didn't ask, they just used their guns.

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  • RELIGION

    Julia Gillard and Labor's moral decline

    • Frank Brennan
    • 27 September 2011
    28 Comments

    Julia Gillard asked her advisers to design a system not for offshore processing but for offshore dumping. If John Howard had tried this in 2001, Labor would have gone ballistic. The advice of Gillard's intermittently trusted advisers is no longer worth the paper it is written on.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Radio National slaps intellectual rigour

    • Michael Mullins
    • 26 September 2011
    12 Comments

    Author of The Slap Christos Tsiolkas wrote to the ABC Board last Monday to plead the case for maintaining a stand-alone books program on Radio National. 'Stand-alone' refers to the specialisation that allows for the intellectual rigour that has made the station exceptional.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why I support gay marriage

    • Kristina Keneally
    • 26 September 2011
    108 Comments

    It gives me no relish to be at odds with my Church. But it also gives me no joy to see people who are created in God's image unable to fully express their humanity, or live with the rights and dignity that heterosexual people are afforded.

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