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Vol 21 No 21

24 October 2011


 

  • AUSTRALIA

    Gillard's grotesque people smuggler sledge

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 04 November 2011
    20 Comments

    So-called people smugglers are often penniless teenagers who are simply a link in the chain for those who are seeking legitimate asylum. The Government's new retrospective law will punish such individuals for an act that was legal at the time it was committed.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Bringing poetry back to politics

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 04 November 2011
    5 Comments

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Bringing poetry back to politics

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 04 November 2011

    'The failure of the Rudd and Gillard administrations', said Paul Keating last week, 'is the lack of an over-arching story.' Eureka Street poetry editor Philip Harvey believes poets have a role in articulating a sense of meaning and direction that is lacking in politics and the media.

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  • RELIGION

    Sharing the journey with agnostics and Qantas

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 November 2011
    27 Comments

    The Pope believes agnostics and Christians are on a shared journey, committed to peace and human dignity. The concept of the shared journey has consequences for the life of the Church, as in the Bishop Bill Morris saga, but also for events such as the Qantas controversy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Attack of the killer Jews

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 03 November 2011
    1 Comment

    Nino and Bernie are nasty pieces of work. They preside over criminal activities with arrogance and amorality, and substantiate sinister personas with easy violence. In a post-politically correct world, it's okay for Jews to be bad guys, too.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Wreckers at work in leaky Labor

    • John Warhurst
    • 02 November 2011
    9 Comments

    The Gillard cabinet leaks are a sure sign of government instability. The worst aspect of the leaks is the likelihood that they are the product not just of understandable policy differences, but of leadership destabilisation.

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  • CARTOON

    Turbulence ahead

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 02 November 2011

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of children passed

    • Alison Sampson
    • 02 November 2011
    22 Comments

    'Did I have a brother once?' asks a little boy, no longer sure. His mother's eyes fill with tears. 'Yes, darling. A long time ago, you had a baby brother of your own.' He shouts triumphantly, 'I did have a brother!' and runs off. We mothers glance at each other, then look away. There are no words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Liturgy translation prophecy

    • Marlene Marburg
    • 01 November 2011
    24 Comments

    Two blessings, one resurrected, one still in the tomb. We are not pre-Vatican. We think whole, body and soul ... We are not parrots in a pew trembling. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What matters in Qantas confrontation

    • Brian Lawrence
    • 01 November 2011
    9 Comments

    The Qantas industrial dispute is likely to make a major contribution to the history of Australian industrial relations. The important issue is whether Qantas should have been required to threaten substantial damage to itself and to the national economy before it could gain access to arbitration.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gillard's gambling problem

    • Michael Mullins
    • 31 October 2011
    18 Comments

    Care for problem gamblers needs to be balanced against care for workers whose jobs are threatened by proposed reforms. Otherwise, the Gillard Government is open to the accusation that it is putting its own political survival ahead of the wellbeing of these workers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bringing civility back to the parliamentary cockfight

    • Tony Kevin
    • 31 October 2011
    14 Comments

    Many Australian politicians who should know better give the people and the media exactly what they want: rancorous confrontations and barbed insults. The 'tough' way in which Australian politics is played corrodes civility and potentially erodes our democracy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian larrikinism is a royal myth

    • Ellena Savage
    • 28 October 2011
    22 Comments

    The fact the Queen is a very nice lady doesn't negate her inherited privilege, her arbitrary powers, and the fact her reign isolates many Australians. There is a myth that Australia is a larrikin nation. But we are a nation not of provocateurs, but of conformists.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Self-interest as a path to Aboriginal flourishing

    • Dan O'Donovan
    • 28 October 2011
    6 Comments

    Noel Pearson sees self-interest as key to the flourishing of Aboriginal communities. But traditionally self-interest did not occur to the Aboriginal mentality. In the pre-'scientific kinship system, everything was inter-related and inter-dependent. Can the concepts co-exist?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    CHOGM and the Common Good

    • Jack de Groot
    • 28 October 2011
    6 Comments

    If every economic decision has a moral consequence then the voice of the most marginalised should be amplified in economic discussions. CHOGM provides an opportunity to devise new solutions based on justice and compassion. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Australia's child abuse parable

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 27 October 2011
    4 Comments

    At its heart is an act of violence against a child. But on the whole The Slap stands as an epic parable of middle class Australia. The tagline 'Whose side are you on?' is a furphy: it is impossible to wholly sympathise with any character. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Putting the faith back into development

    • Duncan Maclaren
    • 27 October 2011
    3 Comments

    The development theory of 'modernisation' taught that old traditions, including religion, had to disappear for people to be 'developed'. This purely Western model is now seen wanting. All faiths put the human person, not economic theories, at the centre of development.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Depression treatment beyond Jeff Kennett

    • Lyn Bender
    • 27 October 2011
    17 Comments

    The problem with the prevailing notion of depression as a disease to be eradicated is that it sidelines the 'human factor'. After ten years of good groundwork, we need something new from key mental health institutions such as Beyond Blue.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love the monarch, spurn the monarchy

    • Moira Rayner
    • 26 October 2011
    17 Comments

    In a simpler time a visit from our head of state seemed to make us feel better about ourselves. Like many Australians, I hold dear the old lady, but have no fear that democracy will shatter when her life and the monarchy slowly come to their natural end.

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  • CARTOON

    The Queen's tour of duties

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 26 October 2011

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Roasts and race in segregated South Africa

    • Cecile Yazbek
    • 26 October 2011
    1 Comment

    Anthony cleans gutters. Some people give him money. When he has enough he buys himself a piece of chicken. 'Where is your mother,' I wonder, 'who roasted fat chickens in our oven, and cooked giant pots of meaty bones for our dogs, her brown arms pitted with burns from our kettles?'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Farmed out

    • Helen Hagemann
    • 25 October 2011

    He drew fear from flood and seedless sun. She traded contradiction for curves and valley hips, verdant sod of earth, reckless drift of goats. When the bailiff came, the end of lamb and beef, she clung to rock and let the salt erupt ...

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  • RELIGION

    Closing the case of Bishop Bill Morris

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 October 2011
    86 Comments

    The issues raised by Bishop Bill Morris' dismissal were not about the Pope's right to act, but about the transparency of the process. The Australian Bishops' letter about the matter is an act of closure. But troubling questions remain. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Even Gaddafi deserves compassion

    • Michael Mullins
    • 24 October 2011
    17 Comments

    Gaddafi undoubtedly suffered from some form of mental illness that had unspeakably tragic consequences for the people of Libya. The jubilation of Libyans is understandable, but the country will not prosper while Gaddafi supporters remain antagonised and the country divided.

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  • RELIGION

    Reuniting church and state

    • Gary Bouma
    • 24 October 2011
    16 Comments

    The biblical injunction that Christians 'Give to God the things due to God and to Caesar the things due to Caesar' does not legitimise the separation of church and state. We live in a time when religious voices have returned with greater strength to the arenas of civil discourse.

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