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Vol 28 No 8

23 April 2018


 

  • ENVIRONMENT

    The fight to make water a human right

    • Cristy Clark
    • 03 May 2018
    2 Comments

    In 2010, the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council recognised a human right to water, guaranteeing access for everyone to 'sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses'. Eight years on, it is past time that Australia incorporated this right into domestic law.

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  • CARTOON

    Hell and high profits

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 02 May 2018

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Brown on the inside, white on the out

    • Amber Dauzat
    • 02 May 2018
    2 Comments

    I remember holding your hand, brown against white. Holding it so tight, so the waves of dirty looks and hushed giggles didn't wash my tiny body away. They asked what a 'wet back' was doing with a little white girl. They asked what it was like to have a dad that talked so funny. They asked things I didn't know the answers to.

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  • RELIGION

    Subverting idolatry in churches and banks

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 May 2018
    31 Comments

    The banking royal commission has already come to resemble the earlier child abuse royal commission. To observers who share a personal and public-spirited interest in the decent functioning of institutions, the similarities invite reflection on why two apparently different forms of institution should behave in such similar ways.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    History taints Turnbull's fight against corruption

    • Brendan Byrne
    • 01 May 2018
    10 Comments

    While it is a matter of public record the Turnbull government blocked attempts to establish a royal commission into the financial services sector on multiple occasions, the question as to why, especially when it expeditiously facilitated a similar inquiry into corruption within the union movement, is of more than academic interest.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Newstart needs a new start

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 May 2018
    12 Comments

    The Turnbull government holds the view that tax relief for companies and middle-income earners is necessary to improve the economic prosperity of Australia, offering a financial hand up to households struggling to pay their bills. For those on Newstart, though, those same increased costs of living are being all but ignored.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The rosella's last walk (an eco parable)

    • Julie Perrin
    • 30 April 2018
    20 Comments

    The bushland forms part of the scant wild space remaining in coastland eroded by development. I speak my husband's name. 'Look,' I whisper. The bright green bird lies still in the late afternoon light, showing no signs of life. But the rosella is scrambling. No obvious cause of injury is visible.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The rewards of reviving languages

    • Sheila Ngoc Pham
    • 27 April 2018
    4 Comments

    As someone who has a language background which will in all likelihood not make it past one more generation in my family here in Australia, I've long understood the way language loss can occur as a result of migration, to say nothing of acts like colonisation. These are great forces that are difficult but, as I've found, not impossible to resist.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cities are people too

    • David Ishaya Osu
    • 27 April 2018
    1 Comment

    Whatever city development process is to be adopted, the spirit of community is key: landscape to networks to streets to public spaces to buildings. The approach ought to center on the fact that human needs and behaviours vary, and so cities automatically take the shape of the sensibilities of people.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A parent's guide to pop culture diversity

    • Fatima Measham
    • 26 April 2018
    3 Comments

    The moment in Power Rangers when Cam Watanabe turned into the Green Samurai, I looked at my son's face and could sense what it meant to him. Pop culture validates or marginalises, depending on who is in the frame. Who gets to be seen and heard, and under what circumstances, are political decisions, whether consciously or not.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Random landings

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 26 April 2018
    2 Comments

    We're about to land, but I don't know where I'm going. The landscape spread below me is a tableau of muddy waters and tin-roofed houses poking out from palm groves. I thought I'd be flying direct to Paro, in Bhutan, but discovered once airborne that this Royal Bhutan Airways flight would be landing first at a place I'd never heard of.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remembering my friend Beverley Farmer

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 April 2018
    8 Comments

    Australian writer Beverley Farmer died on 16 April. She and I had been friends, albeit usually long-distance ones, for more than 30 years. It seems to me now that we had so much in common that friendship was almost inevitable: it was just a matter of timing that first meeting.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Imperfect score for Gold Coast's 'equality' games

    • John Warhurst
    • 24 April 2018
    3 Comments

    The number of medals available to men and women was equal. In this respect the games were better than the cultural norms of some of the competing countries. Integration of disabled athletes was also significant. Against this generally positive background the media persisted in an approach which was needlessly one-eyed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Thirst for righteousness over Aboriginal deaths

    • Michele Madigan
    • 24 April 2018
    13 Comments

    Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, NITV re-screened Richard Frankland's 1993 documentary Who Killed Malcolm Smith? Watching it, it became totally clear to me about Manus Island and Nauru. Perhaps as a nation this violence, this contempt of the 'other', is in our DNA.

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  • CARTOON

    Not quite what the Anzacs fought for

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 24 April 2018
    1 Comment

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Remembering shared humanity on Anzac Day

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 April 2018
    22 Comments

    The tension between remembering those who died and celebrating those who fought makes the celebration of Anzac Day inherently controversial. It is seen by many to canonise military values. But the risk is less to glorify war than to sanitise it by allowing time and space to take away its physical reality, and with it the sadness of war.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Subverting your world with a handful of stories

    • Ellen Shelley, John Cranmer
    • 23 April 2018
    4 Comments

    The telling of stories is at the heart of making a new world. They have inherent within them seeds of many possible futures, that take root in the most rocky of soils and surprising places of uncertainty, creating strongly blooming imaginations that have decided to live for ever.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The big, bad business of America's war industry

    • David James
    • 20 April 2018
    6 Comments

    As the West flirts with starting World War III in Syria, it is worth examining some of the financial and business dynamics behind the US 'military industrial complex'. War may not be good business, but it is big business. And in contrast to Russia and China, the industry in the US is heavily privatised, including the use of mercenaries.

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  • PODCAST

    The indispensable right to water

    • Podcast
    • 19 April 2018

    Water is an indispensable resource, but also the site of many injustices. In this episode we talk to Dr Cristy Clark, whose research on water rights in places like Manila, Michigan and Soweto, shows the effects of a distorted view of water.

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