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Vol 29 No 23

17 November 2019


 

  • MEDIA

    Engaging thoughtfully with racist Disney

    • Yen-Rong Wong
    • 28 November 2019
    7 Comments

    While there is value in pointing out incorrect or inappropriate behaviour, we are also at a point where we are perhaps a little too quick to declare someone or something 'cancelled'. Many problematic depictions have occurred over the years, and we do ourselves no favours by ignoring them or pretending they did not exist.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Patients' pain is real, and so is medical bias

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 28 November 2019
    1 Comment

    This bias continues to be so prevalent not only because medicine is a reflection of society, but because medicine was created with cisgender white neurotypical able-bodied men as the baseline. Those underlying assumptions are still baked into medical systems and filter down to all aspects of medicine.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    I'm not anti-China but pro democracy

    • Yen-Rong Wong
    • 27 November 2019
    6 Comments

    I have the luxury of laughing off jokes that make light of the power dynamic between mainland China and Taiwan and Hong Kong, but for many of my friends, it's not such a light matter. I struggle to put myself in their shoes, and I feel a sense of hopelessness that I'm not able to do more.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Righting the wrongs of robodebt

    • Darren O'Donovan
    • 27 November 2019
    7 Comments

    The uncertainties are not ended by last week's announcement. The statement only vaguely signals that the Department will 'work' with recipients to identify 'further proof points'. What constitutes a 'proof point'? The government needs to disavow its past conduct in a much deeper, detailed and clear way. Instead, it has gone silent.

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  • CARTOON

    The Australian dream

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 26 November 2019

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Secret trials in the Australian 'police state'

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 26 November 2019
    15 Comments

    It sounds like a police state effort. An author makes an attempt to assist a pseudonymously named prisoner publish a memoir. The effort is scotched by the authorities. The police spring into action raiding the cell of that prisoner, and that of his brother. All take place without the knowledge of the Australia media or public.

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  • MEDIA

    Tips for media covering the Disability RC

    • Jane Britt
    • 26 November 2019
    3 Comments

    The media played an important role in getting us to a royal commission. Now, it will play a role in how the RC paves the way for reducing rates of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation experienced by people with disability. It will also play a role in enabling survivors of trauma to share and start healing from their experiences.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The theatre of distance

    • John Allison
    • 25 November 2019
    2 Comments

    I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gerard Manley Hopkins on advocacy and pests

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 November 2019
    5 Comments

    Hopkins' words highlight how difficult it is for poets or lesser human beings to focus consistently on the particularity of each human being, let alone of each being in the world. Yet this is a necessary condition for recognising the claim that each person and the world make on us. It is no wonder that we sometimes falter in our commitment.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Getting serious about children's rights

    • Bree Alexander
    • 22 November 2019
    4 Comments

    From strip searches to a needlessly low minumum age of criminal responsibility, Australia continues to be a menacing place for children encountering law enforcement. The need to be seen as 'tough on crime' plagues the major parties and precludes nuances within the criminal justice sphere including the protection of the rights of the child.

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  • ECONOMICS

    It's the end of 'industry as usual', so what next?

    • David James
    • 22 November 2019
    5 Comments

    At the next global financial crisis, when questions about what we want our monetary system to do for us become a matter of survival, why not devise a transactional system that is not just geared towards the consumption of goods and services, but involves monetary exchanges for social goods, such as sustainable production, or civic benefit?

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The power of gift-giving without the waste

    • Cristy Clark
    • 21 November 2019
    4 Comments

    As we pare back more and more, I have started to realise that there is a risk in taking things too far. The consumer orgy of the past may have been unsightly, but gift giving itself also serves a valuable social function, and we may be at risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Farmers and Traditional Owners decry SA nuclear vote

    • Michele Madigan
    • 20 November 2019
    15 Comments

    The Minister was delighted to announce that in Kimba the long awaited vote to host a permanent facility for national low level radiactive waste and storage for intermediate level radioactive waste had concluded. The result: 61.17 per cent voted in favour. Unsurprisingly, he failed to mention that voting rights in the poll were severely restricted.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The bushfires of the vanities

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 November 2019
    10 Comments

    The fact that they so easily turned their attention away from the lives of the people threatened by fire to brawling about their own virtues and lack of them offers little hope that the lives of Australians will count with them when they reflect on the causes and the proper response to the fires.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A mystical intrusion in nature

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 20 November 2019
    4 Comments

    Johnson describes this encounter as one of grandeur, the same feeling some adherents of religion experience when they visit a sacred site or enter a holy place of worship. In this way, nature is a mystical experience. It's the closest feeling I get to an overwhelming presence that is all encompassing and all forgiving at the same time.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Conversations with refugees in PNG

    • Joshua Lourensz
    • 19 November 2019
    5 Comments

    'Refugees/not refugees — here it is all the same,' a man tells me with a shrug. There seems to be both recognition of the impossibility of the situation for all who have been left here — but also an attitude that no one should be left behind.

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  • CARTOON

    Signs of the times

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 18 November 2019

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate is disrupting children's education

    • Lauren Rickards, Blanche Verlie, Briony Towers, Bronwyn Lay
    • 18 November 2019
    9 Comments

    Some have argued we shouldn't discuss climate change during this bushfire emergency. Yet when children previously tried to protest climate change they were told to 'stay in school'. The statement denies the evidence that our normal routines are already being disrupted by climate change.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A visit among the men of Manus

    • Carolina Gottardo
    • 18 November 2019
    7 Comments

    I recently visited Port Moresby as part of a delegation of Catholic leaders. I have worked with refugees and migrants for more than 20 years in different countries. I have been part of many serious and confronting human rights struggles. Nonetheless, I was not expecting what I saw and heard in PNG, and it deeply touched me.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Near Ferntree Gully

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 18 November 2019
    3 Comments

    Staring toward the stringy picture through a linguistic lens I have begun to see that the elderly magic, deplored by most religions, was a daughter of coincidence mathematically robed in some downright glorious colours.

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  • MEDIA

    Big Wellness goops up real health talk

    • Vivienne Cowburn
    • 15 November 2019
    3 Comments

    Rather than credit their physiques to intense exercise and diet regimens, celebrities now owe it all to 'wellness'. And you owe it to your health to get on board the wellness express. When it comes to conversations regarding women's health and noncommunicable diseases however, this talk of wellness becomes problematic.

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  • RELIGION

    The light in John Henry Newman's darkness

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 November 2019
    6 Comments

    Dad is out watering the garden, but all the front windows are open, so he can hear the piano and his wife and two daughters singing. He often hums along to our repertoire, which is a mixture of Anglo-Celtic songs, Australian numbers — and, memorably, 'Lead, Kindly Light', written by the recently canonised St John Henry Newman.

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