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Vol 19 No 15

03 August 2009


 

  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Not just any old superpower

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 14 August 2009
    4 Comments

    Attempts by the Chinese Government to stop a documentary about Uighur activist and leader Rebiya Kadeer from screening in Melbourne remind us that China is a vast country governed by very different values to our own.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Asylum seekers good for Australia's soul

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 14 August 2009
    11 Comments

    According to P. J. O'Rourke, today's asylum seekers are tomorrow's 'really good Australians'. Australia has established Uighur and Turkish communities and could easily accommodate the few remaining ex-Gitmo Uighurs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The gospel according to John Hughes

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 August 2009
    4 Comments

    I don't use the word gospel lightly. Here was a secular film that extrapolated, in teenagers' language, the notion of 'love thy neighbour'. Filmmaker John Hughes died last week. The Breakfast Club remains his masterpiece.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Limiting discrimination won't harm religious freedoms

    • Moira Rayner
    • 13 August 2009
    10 Comments

    Victoria's Equal Opportunity Act allows religious and quasi-religious groups and individuals to 'discriminate' lawfully. It's hard to see the relevance of the beliefs or lifestyle of a cleaner or clerk in an independent, para-religious school.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Economists and other prophets

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 August 2009
    3 Comments

    Economists are often, sometimes spectacularly, wrong. But like all prophets, they are unabashed by and unpunished for abject failures. They pop up from each new set of ruins, surprised yet unrepentant, princes of a plethora of evanescent predictions.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Young Somalis are Australians too

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 12 August 2009
    18 Comments

    If there's a problem with Somali youth integrating into the community, let's all own it. That means taking an interest and being open to friendship. It's not just the responsibility of bureaucrats who devise 'policy solutions'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Gliding in contentment

    • Ivan Head
    • 11 August 2009

    On a streaming easy line, kilometers of small creatures' terror terrain beneath the reigning kyrios of ripped earth.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    When freedom of religion trumps free speech

    • Mick MacAndrew
    • 11 August 2009
    16 Comments

    In April, Germany's highest court ruled against animal rights group PETA. It said the Holocaust is part of the identity of being a Jew, and any attempt to use the fate of the victims for trivial reasons is a defamation of the religion.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Generation Y for yoghurt

    • Edwina Byrne
    • 10 August 2009
    7 Comments

    It's fashionable to make all sorts of claims about Generation Y. Among other things, we are spoilt, attention-deficient, highly educated and unemployable. If you stop prophesising our doom for a moment, you might see we're not as hopeless as we seem.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Regulation could make Kyle a good boy

    • Michael Mullins
    • 10 August 2009
    5 Comments

    Kyle Sandilands and other shock jocks may want to behave well, but they are constrained by commercial logic, and need the helping hand of regulation. Even John Laws intimated this last week when he told VEGA 95.3: 'I never wanted to create mischief that would be damaging to people.'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A brief history of Christian student activism

    • Avril Hannah-Jones
    • 07 August 2009
    1 Comment

    The Australian Student Christian Movement was ahead of the mainstream church in its rejection of fundamentalism, its activism, support for ecumenism, and encouragement of lay and female leadership. Since the 1960s it has been a movement in exile.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Patron saint of troublemakers

    • James Martin
    • 07 August 2009
    8 Comments

    In 1871 Mary MacKillop was excommunicated by her local bishop on the grounds that 'she had incited the sisters to disobedience and defiance'. The idea of a holy woman who had been at loggerheads with the hierarchy is not new in the annals of the saints.

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  • RELIGION

    Bonhoeffer's ethics not for show

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 August 2009
    7 Comments

    Two years ago, Kevin Rudd wrote about German wartime theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer stressed character. His ethics were not expressed in rhetoric about hard times and hard decisions, but in acting responsibly without regard to popularity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Incest and redemption

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 August 2009
    5 Comments

    The publicity poster for Beautiful Kate is as ambiguous as the controversial Bill Henson photographs it so blatantly references. The film unpacks these ambiguities, not solving but exacerbating them and making them sing with empathy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Cory Aquino and the people's triumph over tyranny

    • Fatima Measham
    • 05 August 2009
    3 Comments

    Cory Aquino will be remembered for the role she played in the Philippines' People Power Revolution of 1986. It was the first instance in modern times where civilians, not the military, unseated a corrupt leader without even a call to arms.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A bookish look at cars and sport

    • Brian Doyle
    • 05 August 2009
    2 Comments

    What if all the cars and sports teams we name for fleet and powerful animals and cosmic energies and cool-sounding things that don't exist or mean anything are, effective immediately, renamed for literary characters and authors.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    That effing rain

    • Margaret McCarthy
    • 04 August 2009
    2 Comments

    The drops are not an army ... Each promised drop gives the roof .. a temporary rash which .. fades before the next gob hits. .. The water does not rain as a team.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Liberals' hidden intellectual arsenal

    • Sarah Burnside
    • 04 August 2009
    12 Comments

    A recent editorial in The Australian regretted that Australian conservatives have conceded the intellectual high ground to Labor. In fact, the Liberal Party and its supporters have arguably been far more astute than the ALP in nurturing academics and research fellows sympathetic to the 'liberal conservative' cause.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Mum and dad investors cop economic tough love

    • Catherina Toh
    • 03 August 2009
    8 Comments

    An ethos of tough love balks at taxpayer subsidies for anyone foolish or unlucky enough to make the wrong investment decision. In Australia we prefer to see people as victims and expect the government to clean up the mess.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    In praise of slow arrests

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 August 2009

    Tasers are regarded as a fast and easy means for police to restrain alleged offenders. But that's not what's needed for a response that respects the rights of the individuals being apprehended.

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