Vol 24 No 9

12 May 2014

AUSTRALIA

Australia slips in generosity ranking
- Paul O'Callaghan
- 23 May 2014
6 Comments
Last week the Federal Government committed to a much smaller and 'just in our neighbourhood' aid program for the long term. This major shift sent a perplexing signal to the world, with Australia abandoning Africa's poorest at a time when Australian mining investment in Africa continues to boom.
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AUSTRALIA

Waiting room blues
- Brian Matthews
- 23 May 2014
6 Comments
In the specialist’s waiting room, I usually while away the hours with quality BYO literary fare. But one day I had left my book in the car, and I searched the reading rack for reading matter on subjects more interesting than the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Australian holiday. Succumbing at last to extreme boredom I got up, slid Soap World from under its ragtag competitors, and all was revealed.
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AUSTRALIA

Budget makes asylum seeker vilification official
- Kerry Murphy
- 22 May 2014
26 Comments
The Government's vilification of people arriving by boat has reached the level where the term 'illegal' features in the Budget documents. Immigration Minister Morrison has insisted on referring to people arriving by boat as 'illegals' for some years, despite the Migration Act using the less pejorative term 'unlawful non-citizen'. This is not just a lawyer's linguistic debate; if it were not important, the Government would not insist on the term.
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AUSTRALIA

Love creates space for restorative justice
- Andrew Hamilton
- 22 May 2014
12 Comments
For the good of victims and the community prisoners need to find the space in which they can feel remorse for the harm they have done, reflect on and change the patterns of life that contributed to the crime, and come to act accountably. To include love in penal justice may seem impossible. But recently in court a man was sentenced to jail for dangerous driving that led to the death of a young woman. Her father then embraced the driver.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Feelgood celebration of white male privilege
- Tim Kroenert
- 22 May 2014
1 Comment
Given last week's unequivocal iteration of the dire state of Australian politics, perhaps we've earned the right to a bit of escapism. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty proves adept at turning the warm-and-fuzzies up to 11. Still there's no escaping the sense that Walter's ability to jet around the world in order to find himself is implicitly an expression of affluent, white male privilege.
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AUSTRALIA

Let's be good neighbours with Timor
- Frank Brennan
- 21 May 2014
10 Comments
In 2006 Australia and Timor Leste hastily signed the Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) at a time of considerable political instability in Timor. After last year's revelation of evidence of Australian spying on the Timorese during the negotiation of CMATS, the Timorese decided to challenge its validity, and in March this year they had a spectacular win in the International Court of Justice that caused great embarrassment to Australia.
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AUSTRALIA

Moral teaching that falls on deaf ears
- Neil Ormerod
- 21 May 2014
21 Comments
At a time when we are preoccupied with the shock and immorality of the budget, the Australian Catholic Bishops issue a direct and forceful challenge to current government policy. 'The time has come to examine our conscience.' But it seems no-one is listening.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

My phone addiction nightmare
- Isabella Fels
- 21 May 2014
2 Comments
$550 worth of calls on a $69 a month plan seemed like a total dream. I could keep myself hanging on the phone talking to my boyfriend and family all day and night long at my own convenience. I felt a sense of empowerment and freedom that I never felt before ... I woke up screaming over the $700 bill I incurred in just two weeks. What have I done? I felt weak. My future now felt bleak. There was simply no way I could pay it off.
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CARTOON

More political fairytales
- Fiona Katauskas
- 20 May 2014
5 Comments
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Old men playing bocce
- Shane McCauley
- 20 May 2014
2 Comments
Muffled exclamations send Italian syllables into the far pale blue... the small cannon balls bounce across the peaceful green... the men huddle convene for a verdict.
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INTERNATIONAL

The trust deficit is international
- Evan Ellis
- 20 May 2014
2 Comments
Despite the bloodletting of last week's budget, the Australian Government could still find some 12 billion dollars for 58 Joint Strike Fighters. This is part of the reality of the Asian Century. Australia will need statesmen and women of the highest calibre, but ultimately a lasting peace requires all nations to act together to create an international order that is actually ordered.
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AUSTRALIA

Budget points to new sectarianism
- Michael Mullins
- 19 May 2014
6 Comments
When Tony Abbott reintroduced knights and dames back in March, critics said it was a sign he was 'stuck in the 1950s'. Another characteristic of 1950s Australian society was the sectarianism that bitterly divided the nation along religious lines. There are echoes of this in last Tuesday's Federal Budget announcement that schools will lose the option of appointing non-religious welfare workers under the national school chaplaincy program.
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AUSTRALIA

Bill Shorten's WorkChoices moment
- Fatima Measham
- 19 May 2014
16 Comments
Notwithstanding Kevin Rudd's merit as a candidate, there is no doubt that the unions-led campaign against WorkChoices was pivotal to handing government to Labor. What Bill Shorten has been handed this week in the Federal Budget is several WorkChoices with which to galvanise people. He needed it. His Budget reply offered a glimpse of the sort of Opposition Leader that Australians deserve.
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ECONOMICS

Blessed are the moneymakers
- David James
- 16 May 2014
9 Comments
The 2014 Federal Budget has created a new hierarchy of virtue in Australian society, with well off investors deemed to be good and the disadvantaged bad. It is not so much class war as a war between capital and the rest of society. Those wielding significant capital are useful, while those who can save little, and have little to invest, are considered a burden.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Malcolm Fraser whacks lackey Australia
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 16 May 2014
2 Comments
Fraser was a ruthless, conservative political animal who today is one of our most prominent human rights champions. The elder statesman is quite the angry young man in print. He delights in telegraphing his haymakers and following through with a well-placed elbow or two. Put bluntly, Fraser suggests we need to shed our lackey status. 'We need the United States for defence,' he argues, 'but we only need defence because of the United States.'
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Seeing double in Hockey's dystopia
- Tim Kroenert
- 15 May 2014
2 Comments
The Double proffers a nightmare vision in which the human spirit is no match for the corrupt and corrupting power of a society obsessed with productivity and material achievement. In a week where we have seen an Australian Budget that gives favour to economic rationalism and the wellbeing of the wealthy, over that of some of our society's most needy citizens, such cynicism resonates powerfully. That is a tragedy.
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AUSTRALIA

Whose rule book is Abbott playing from?
- Neil Ormerod
- 15 May 2014
48 Comments
It took John Howard until his third term before he let his personal leanings completely off the leash. It led to his electoral demise. Abbott is doing much the same in his first term, over-reaching, thinking himself invulnerable to a political backlash. Whereas Machiavelli's prince could rule through force, Abbott must face an electorate whose trust in political promises has been completely eroded. Our political system will take a long time to recover.
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MEDIA

Lady legend of Jesuit Publications
- Morag Fraser
- 14 May 2014
2 Comments
Jesuit Publications was a robust workplace, with characters enough to fill a Trollope novel. Geraldine was one of the characters, but she was also an essential ingredient in the glue that kept us together. One morning she arrived, a little overheated from the long tram ride in, and checked herself in one of the mirrored pillars. I heard the shriek from upstairs. 'I've come all the way to work, in the tram, in my black petticoat. I forgot to put on my skirt!'
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EUREKA STREET TV

Moderate Muslim's wisdom for Nigerian extremists
- Peter Kirkwood
- 14 May 2014
2 Comments
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CARTOON

Australians all let us lament
- Fiona Katauskas
- 14 May 2014
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
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AUSTRALIA

Budget more slow-burn than big bang
- Jackie Brady
- 14 May 2014
3 Comments
The Budget does not signal an end to the 'age of entitlement', as there are still plenty of beneficiaries of government expenditure or foregone revenue. You don't need to be an economist to see that collectively the Budget measures will impact negatively on the income levels of the poor and disadvantaged. The discussion now must be who will pick up the pieces left behind by Government in developing a system with obvious gaps.
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AUSTRALIA

A Budget to enshrine inequality
- Andrew Hamilton
- 14 May 2014
47 Comments
Governments have always included in their budgets a 'we're serious' clause as part of their determination to fix the economy. It has normally been directed at the vices of the underclass such as alcohol and tobacco. Now governments slash spending on the welfare of the disadvantaged.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Bush week in my tin kingdom
- Kit Kelen
- 13 May 2014
Everything green wants up, a drought and you, position the head right under the tap, ancient propellors over the land, guess who cast them? This is the month of Sundays
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AUSTRALIA

Border control shake-up takes us into dangerous waters
- Tony Kevin
- 13 May 2014
46 Comments
Scott Morrison has announced the formation of a powerful new paramilitary force with its own ideology, training and rank structure, answerable only to an immigration minister. There is a disturbing comparison that may be drawn between this new agency, apparently with no legal or constitutional checks and balances outside itself, and the Schutzstaffel security service established by Hitler and answerable only to him as leader.
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AUSTRALIA

The theology of Chris Lilley
- Michael Mullins
- 12 May 2014
12 Comments
The jury is out on whether Chris Lilley's new ABC1 comedy Jonah from Tonga gives a free kick to racism and other forms of discriminatory behaviour. The prejudices in Lilley's Jonah are depictions of the wounds of Australian society, not the attempt of a far-right ideologue to promote a stratified nation based on race.
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INTERNATIONAL

Kidnapped Nigerian girls put the lie to Western freedom
- Catherine Marshall
- 12 May 2014
7 Comments
It would be foolish to believe that female liberation can occur in a vacuum: as long as there are girls and women being brutalised in the DRC, schoolgirls being sold into slavery in Nigeria's border regions, girls around the world are being subjected to female genital mutilation and women being supressed by religious ideology, then the acquisition of our own freedoms — flawed as they are — is a hollow victory indeed.
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Vol 24 No 9