Vol 23 No 12

17 June 2013

ARTS AND CULTURE

Sex and power in football and politics
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 28 June 2013
5 Comments
A young writer has crash tackled the ugly questions of non-consensual sex, coercion and the male privilege and misuse of power that can flow from sporting success. Yet when it comes to our football codes — let alone our political arena — a conversation needs to move beyond gender name-calling or the 'us and them' polemic.
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INTERNATIONAL

Dawn of a human rights revolution
- Pat Walsh
- 28 June 2013
4 Comments
The Cold War not only divided Berlin. It divided human rights into two politicised and hostile camps. Socialist nations championed social and economic rights over the civil and political rights prioritised by capitalist nations. Twenty years ago this month, the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna rejected this demarcation and declared that human rights were indivisible, complementary and interdependent.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Pilgrim's misguided tilt at TV fame
- Tim Kroenert
- 27 June 2013
Luciano pleads with two startled widows at a funeral, who reassure him that he is on the right path to getting into 'the house'. While they think they've offered comfort to a troubled seeker, he thinks he's received an inside tip from Big Brother's spies. The dissonance between his pursuit of fame, and the comfort found by others in religious faith, is profound.
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RELIGION

Politics of remembering
- Andrew Hamilton
- 27 June 2013
2 Comments
When Polish Jews were herded into the closed Warsaw Ghetto, Chaim Kaplan kept a diary to ensure that 'in our scroll of agony, not one small detail can be omitted'. This kind of remembering is both deeply personal and profoundly public, and invites us to celebrate human freedom. The remembering involved in the collection of information by the United States and Great Britain is of a quite different character.
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AUSTRALIA

Rudd's second coming
- Ray Cassin
- 27 June 2013
21 Comments
Can Rudd fare any better? He is a formidable campaigner and consistently rates well above either Abbott or Gillard when poll respondents are asked who is their preferred prime minister. What is more, Labor has a success story to tell about the economy, which the Government thus far has failed to sell. Rudd tells this story without illusions.
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AUSTRALIA

Spare a thought for luckless Gillard
- Moira Rayner
- 27 June 2013
37 Comments
Anyone who knows how it feels to lose a career in mid life will understand how Gillard is feeling today. Now that a most gracious acknowledgement of personal defeat has been given by the first woman to step up to the hardest political job anyone could be asked to do, we must find the time to consider and learn from what we have witnessed about how the country is run.
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AUSTRALIA

The man who would be PM (again)
- Staff
- 27 June 2013
14 Comments
Last year Kevin Rudd sat down with human rights lawyer and Eureka Street columnist Frank Brennan for a candid and in-depth conversation about his faith, his values and his political philosophies. He also took questions from the 500-strong live audience. Relive this fascinating insight into returning Prime Minister Rudd.
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AUSTRALIA

Disrupting sexism
- Fatima Measham
- 26 June 2013
18 Comments
Chief of Army Lt Gen David Morrison summed it up well. In condemning the culture of 'permission' that allowed defence officers to exploit women, he said: 'The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.' Framing sexism in terms of permission should sharpen the way we respond to abuse of women — the same compulsion to conform presents us with opportunities to disrupt tacit permissions.
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CARTOON

Clowning around with Gillard
- Fiona Katauskas
- 26 June 2013
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
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MEDIA

The socialist with rosary beads
- Ray Cassin
- 26 June 2013
6 Comments
Paul Mees, who died last week at the age of 52, was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term; a scholar and teacher with an international reputation; an activist who never shrank from a fight. He was also a man of deep faith, though many who admired Paul ignored this or regarded it as an eccentricity.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Faith, apples and Peter Steele
- Susan Fealy
- 25 June 2013
5 Comments
Where were you? Not in the dark car, inside that shrunken space, on its slow glide to the boneyard. Perhaps in the white lineage of your brothers at the altar, or traced on your crucifix — your DNA, your trust.
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AUSTRALIA

The Catholic Church's toll on Aboriginal Australia
- Mike Bowden
- 25 June 2013
33 Comments
Present members of missionary orders, when writing up the story of their predecessors, tend to present these pioneer missionaries as enlightened men and women suffering hardship to spread the gospel. The destructive effect of the approaches taken by some missionaries does not negate the good work of many others. But it is part of the story and should be told.
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AUSTRALIA

Australia and Indonesia's deadly games of pass-the-parcel
- Tony Kevin
- 24 June 2013
15 Comments
The sinking of the asylum seeker vessel SIEV 358 encapsulates key questions as to why these tragedies too often happen at interfaces between Australia's border protection system and maritime search and rescue system, and the under-resourced Indonesian maritime search and rescue system. Hopefully next week's public inquest by the WA Coroner comes up with some answers.
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AUSTRALIA

Liking Kevin
- Michael Mullins
- 24 June 2013
21 Comments
Rudd's rise from backbencher to Labor leader in the five years to 2006 was facilitated by his weekly presence on Channel 7's Sunrise. Here he created a persona seen as ordinary, trustworthy and familiar to the point of intimacy. Things went wrong when he was unable to work with colleagues to get things done for Australians who saw him as their mate.
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AUSTRALIA

The rise of global surveillance anxiety
- Ray Cassin
- 21 June 2013
7 Comments
Unease about the Australian Federal Police obtaining phone and internet records without a warrant coincided with a greater, global anxiety about the more troublesome surveillance activities of the US National Security Agency. The Obama administration's defence of the NSA has been as lame as Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus's defence of the AFP.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

The crying killer
- Tim Kroenert
- 21 June 2013
1 Comment
Violence is a messy business, even when it is your 'business'. To father, husband and mafia boss Tony Soprano, the conflicting demands of being both a family man and a 'family' man present numerous moral, practical and emotional conflicts. In this role, James Gandolfini took viewers from the softest to the hardest potentialities of human nature.
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AUSTRALIA

History repeats for powerful Australian women
- Brian Matthews
- 21 June 2013
14 Comments
On the face of it, life for a strong, talented and ambitious woman in 19th century Australia was much tougher than it is now. Yet even Louisa Lawson, a pioneer of women's rights who was grievously discriminated against and derided because she dared to excel, was never demeaned or personally debased to the extent Julia Gillard has been.
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AUSTRALIA

Australia's disgusting politics
- Moira Rayner
- 20 June 2013
45 Comments
Gillard is the most prominent woman in our country. She has been repeatedly humiliated, disparaged and ridiculed for that very reason. We may criticise her decisions, but always aware of the context in which they were made, which is dangerously toxic. Her courage under pressure is astonishing, but we ought to despair at her party which is willing itself into annihilation by adding more poison.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Ethical torture porn in genetics research
- Tim Kroenert
- 20 June 2013
During a lecture at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, biologist Geoff Burton speaks of the agonising genetic disorder that claimed the life of his infant son. He insists that his subsequent research into prenatal diagnosis and treatment is not related to eugenics. But merely naming the slippery slope doesn't negate it.
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CARTOON

Warning signs in Canberra
- Fiona Katauskas
- 19 June 2013
1 Comment
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
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AUSTRALIA

A tale of two unsuccessful asylum seekers
- Kerry Murphy
- 19 June 2013
6 Comments
Comparison of these two cases is illuminating. One is the recruit to the Australia A cricket team, Pakistani born Fawad Ahmed. The other is, in Tony Abbott's words, the 'convicted Jihadist terrorist', Egyptian born Sayed Ahmed Abullatif. Ahmed will be the second Pakistani born cricketer in an Australian side that desperately needs a good leg-spinner. Abdullatif has possibly a more difficult road ahead.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

My brother's hat mourns his death
- Brian Doyle
- 19 June 2013
6 Comments
If you were a familiar Irish cap, and had waited all night every night for 30 years for the blessing of the morning when he'd reach for you, knead you and fold you gently over his ungovernable hair, wouldn't you wonder where he was the first few days after he vanished, and feel something like a silent sadness?
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INTERNATIONAL

Obama no 'wuss' but at what cost to Syria?
- Evan Ellis
- 18 June 2013
4 Comments
Alluding to his own military style intervention in Kosovo, Bill Clinton warned Obama not to look like a 'wuss' on Syria. Still, Obama's decision to start providing arms to Syrian rebels is an enormous risk. Australia's history of state interventions to tackle Indigenous disadvantage provide surprisingly apt criteria for evaluating the decision.
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AUSTRALIA

Humiliation at the heart of homelessness
- John Falzon
- 18 June 2013
13 Comments
Recent ABS data reveals NT has both the highest rate of people experiencing homelessness and the highest imprisonment rate of any Australian state. Former Spanish PM Zapatero said 'a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members'. Successive Australian governments have systematically humiliated citizens on the basis of cultural background or health or social status.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

A time when they shared their drugs
- Susan Adams, Peta Edmonds and Lyn McCredden
- 18 June 2013
3 Comments
A man swims back to you like a friendly dog. Asks you for spare change. He hasn't eaten since Thursday and it's Sunday now in the city. You empty your wallet of all its coins. $2.70. The city is heavenly, full of karma. A kid with a snake tattooed on his wrist gives you two cigarettes.
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AUSTRALIA

Talking the talk with Aboriginal students
- Mike Bowden
- 17 June 2013
9 Comments
Ted didn't need a translator. He spoke Kriol fluently having spent many years working with Aboriginal people across the Territory. The locals smiled and visibly opened to him, clearly honoured by his effort to meet with them in their country on the basis of equality and respect. Learning the vernacular, and learning through the vernacular, establishes in students a sense of pride and power.
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RELIGION

Australia's morality drifts with asylum seeker bodies
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 June 2013
20 Comments
Sometimes events take on a significance beyond their historical context. That was the case with Gallipoli and the Eureka Stockade. It may also prove to be the case with the bodies left in the water after an asylum seeker boat sank, and the delay by the Australian authorities to take responsibility for their recovery.
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Vol 23 No 12