Vol 24 No 17

01 September 2014

INTERNATIONAL

Abbott's foreign policy flops
- Tony Kevin
- 12 September 2014
11 Comments
Since Richard Casey was External Affairs Minister in the 1950s, the three pillars of Australian foreign policy have been: a genuine reaching out to our Asian neighbours, adherence to UN-based multilateral values and institutions, and a firm but self-respecting defence partnership with the United States. All those pillars look pretty shaken now.
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RELIGION

Picking on Muslims is getting dull
- Ruby Hamad
- 12 September 2014
22 Comments
The readiness with which some westerners take the most violent and extreme groups as legitimate expressions of Islam betrays the racism that underpins perceptions of Muslims. Whether I like it or not, my religious background and my name tie me to these 'jihadists.' I feel the permanent weight of expectation to publicly apologise for their actions.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Encounter at the gate
- Brian Matthews
- 12 September 2014
6 Comments
I'm standing at the front gate, about to go for a run when he swings round the corner. He speaks in a deep, modulated voice that seems to run on like a quiet stream. Just when you think you might answer, the flow smoothly resumes, and he is an adept prince of the non sequitur. 'Ever take a short cut through the cemetery?'
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AUSTRALIA

Ending feminised poverty
- Kate Galloway
- 11 September 2014
14 Comments
Despite historical gains for women in terms of formal equality, structural issues - wage gap, superannuation gap, childcare, unpaid caring, inequitable income distribution - have not gone away. I do not see why my older women friends should be burdened with accumulated poverty simply because they are women. They carry a material burden because their unpaid work was considered to be performed 'for love', undeserving of financial security.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Disconnected landscapes
- Anthony Morris
- 11 September 2014
As with her previous films, Kelly Reichardt is interested in people moving through and reacting to their landscape. In Night Moves, the drama comes from the way the characters' reaction to their environment cuts them off from the world around them. This refusal to connect turns toxic.
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AUSTRALIA

Suicide taboos and healing memories
- Andrew Hamilton
- 10 September 2014
19 Comments
Suicide excludes people from any participation in this decisive act of people's lives, and also prevents them from understanding it. Suicide is always shrouded in silence, and arouses dread at entering the silence. The wrenching cry at the heart of of memories wrestles with the silence, 'Why did you do it?'.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

A word with dad
- Brian Doyle
- 10 September 2014
4 Comments
Somehow, even with all those children, and with the usual brawl and bawl among his sons, and what surely must have been many a snide remark from his daughter, our dad never lost his temper, or even, that we remember, his equanimity. Just as amazing, he never seemed to miss a crime or misdemeanour, but somehow knew of it instantly.
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CARTOON

'Let them eat birthday cake!'
- Fiona Katauskas
- 10 September 2014
3 Comments
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
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AUSTRALIA

Turning off the lights on Australian research
- Tseen Khoo
- 09 September 2014
4 Comments
The research sector in Australia is increasingly one marked by casualisation and disappearing career paths. The depressed nature of working in this environment means that the very people who we'd want to solve our society's most crucial, pressing issues are the ones who will be looking elsewhere to establish their careers. How do we equip our community with better ways to live, work and connect without research? Where will answers to persistent problems come from?
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AUSTRALIA

The challenge of a five-year Royal Commission
- Frank Brennan
- 09 September 2014
17 Comments
All church members, and not just the victims who continue to suffer, need light, transparency and accountability if the opaque injustices of the past are to be rectified. Justice Peter McClellan and his fellow commissioners have to do more to bring the states and territories to the table and to get real buy-in by all governments.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Winter faces falter
- Lyn McCredden
- 09 September 2014
1 Comment
You moved lightly with your dancer's step and your gentle, gracious hands that knew Mozart and Bach, soil under your nails, old-fashioned hymns, and a child's rounded head. Your heart was woven with the words of Shakespeare and Donne and Eliot, words you gave away to so many hungry to hear.
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AUSTRALIA

Fatal cost of shutting borders
- Andrew Hamilton
- 08 September 2014
28 Comments
From the perspective of Australian policy, both Hamid Kehazaei's death and the loss of the Red Cross contract to support asylum seekers give value for money. When we are dealing with people, however, values other than economic efficiency may come to mind.
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ECONOMICS

Australia's delayed GFC
- David James
- 08 September 2014
7 Comments
What is only now starting to come into focus is the extent to which the whole economy is in hock to house prices. A sharp fall in the housing market will put intense pressure on our major lending institutions, leading to a deeply depressing effect on all parts of the economy. The regulators, as ever, are taking a hands-off approach.
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INTERNATIONAL

Telling good Kurds from bad
- Binoy Kampmark
- 05 September 2014
4 Comments
A debate about arming, and reinforcing the Kurds, is not an open and shut case. European powers and the United States draw the false distinction that there are good Islamic militants and bad ones, with the bad ones supposedly against the Western military program. The game of backing and supporting misunderstood – and dangerous – groups persists.
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AUSTRALIA

Wombs for rent
- Ellena Savage
- 05 September 2014
5 Comments
When Bill Heffernan said that Julia Gillard was unfit for leadership because she was 'deliberately barren', he didn't really err. He just named our preoccupation with motherhood. But is the drive to procreate so powerful and important that it should override the integrity of women in developing countries? Should it continue to be the defining quality of women?
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Breaking the till
- Isabella Fels
- 05 September 2014
5 Comments
As I go down Chapel Street, I feel like I am running a million miles an hour trying to look a million dollars. In the past my mother and my father have had to intervene to stop me letting loose. They have both rescued me from keeping totally unsuitable clothes by showing a letter to the shops by my psychiatrist, stating that I have an 'obsessional preoccupation' with spending money and please can the items be refunded.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Timely liberation
- Anthony Morris
- 04 September 2014
While not everything always turns out for the best in Boyhood, the stakes aren't high in any traditional sense. Instead, time gains power from its sheer passage on the screen. For Mason, the central character, it is a liberation.
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INTERNATIONAL

Thanks for nothing, Adam and Eve
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 September 2014
13 Comments
James Boyce claims that contemporary attitudes to politics, human origins, economics and human psychology can be understood only if we recognise the hidden presuppositions imported from the theology of original sin. Theories on human nature such as those proposed by Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Richard Dawkins and the US Founding Fathers, tried to emancipate people from religious ideas, but often unwittingly enshrined them.
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AUSTRALIA

Making Indigenous Literacy Day obsolete
- Luke Pearson
- 03 September 2014
13 Comments
As a former primary teacher, I have seen the importance of literacy programs for our young people, and the joy and power that comes from learning to read, especially for older students who thought they would never get to read. If schools were given adequate support, resourcing, staffing and training to better cater for the needs and interests of Indigenous students and families, there would hardly be any need to mark Indigenous Literacy Day.
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EUREKA STREET TV

Dangerous impulses around women in power
- Peter Kirkwood
- 03 September 2014
5 Comments
Award-winning journalist Geraldine Doogue explores the experiences of women in leadership, from the nuns who taught her at school to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She reflects on the importance of ambition and achieving work/life balance, and analyses the role of women leaders in the Catholic Church.
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CARTOON

Boys' Own Interventure
- Fiona Katauskas
- 03 September 2014
10 Comments
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

His palm was her country
- Anne Elvey
- 02 September 2014
5 Comments
I woke in a strange dream of a priest who pitied the child born to the mother no longer a nun. From the pew behind, I was the I that spoke up to power.
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INTERNATIONAL

How to measure HIV stigma
- Daniel Reeders
- 02 September 2014
6 Comments
Global targets can be used to benchmark countries – but measuring a reduction in stigma is harder than it sounds. As one of my colleagues asked, 'what's the international standard unit for one stigma?'
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INTERNATIONAL

New Indonesian president offers hope for West Papua
- Pat Walsh
- 01 September 2014
4 Comments
Since its foundation as a modern state in the 1940s, Indonesia has been plagued by a series of conflicts that have threatened the dream of a united republic, inflicted grievous human rights violations and poisoned perceptions of the place, not least in Australia. Only West Papua, perhaps the most complex and intractable of them all, remains.
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AUSTRALIA

Fossil fuels must be demonised
- Michael Mullins
- 01 September 2014
26 Comments
Prime minister Tony Abbott told an industry gathering in May that ’it’s particularly important that we do not demonise the coal industry’. Pope Francis is likely to do just that when he releases his new encyclical on humanity’s role in caring for the earth.
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Vol 24 No 17