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Vol 25 No 11

09 June 2015


 

  • RELIGION

    Francis puts environment above short-term politics

    • Paul Collins
    • 19 June 2015
    24 Comments

    Laudatio si is an extraordinary document addressed to 'every living person on this planet'. Ecological issues are no longer an after thought but up there with social justice and equity in an incisive, practical, realistic and far-reaching encyclical that tackles the most important issues facing us honestly and with absolute integrity. It will upset a lot of apple carts in the Church and in the world.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    There's hope for mediocre women

    • Ellena Savage
    • 19 June 2015
    13 Comments

    I have a friend who tells me she loves seeing what she terms 'mediocre women' at the top of their fields, especially in public, because it shows that feminism is working. Some women have made a success of themselves as men have always done, through acquiring privilege and seizing opportunities with a sense of entitlement, rather than by the myths of brilliance and sacrifice. I like this perspective. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dubious revolutionary Russell Brand takes it to the banks

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 18 June 2015
    3 Comments

    Few would deny the comedian and self-styled revolutionary has fire in his belly. He wonders why, in the wake of recent financial crises, more bankers have not gone to prison. These are salient questions, and Brand doesn't baulk. But there is a touch of Bono about Brand: wealthy and egotistical, you have to wonder how much of his invective against 'the one per cent' is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    It's time to ask why refugees are on the nose

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 June 2015
    13 Comments

    Refugee Week has been overshadowed by stories of harsh new laws, reports of government misbehaviour and ministerial silence. Regrettably hostility towards asylum seekers is widespread. We must look beyond this crabbed little world to imagine a polity in which states cooperate to change the conditions that force refugees to flee.

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  • CARTOON

    The people smugglers' new business model

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 17 June 2015
    3 Comments

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Magna Carta's spotlight on today's political arbitrariness

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 17 June 2015
    3 Comments

    It was far from democratic and arose from circumstances of pure opportunism, but the Magna Carta was created as a break on arbitrary rule and power. Therefore contemporary moves to undermine such principles as the rule of law are prescient. Australia's parliament commemorates its birthday even as it extends the reach of national security laws and endorses a draconian refugee policy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A rant about America's weapons fired economy

    • Brian Doyle
    • 17 June 2015
    22 Comments

    Here's a story. A man who was a soldier in the American army in Iraq tells it to me. A friend of his, one of his best and closest friends, was nearly pierced through by a bullet fired by a sniper. American surgeons removed the bullet and discovered it was a 5.56mm cartridge manufactured in Lake City, Missouri. For profit.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Justice delayed is justice denied for intellectually disabled workers

    • Matthew Dimmock
    • 16 June 2015
    7 Comments

    Of all the vulnerable groups in Australia today, people with intellectual disability are surely up there with the most vulnerable and susceptible to abuse and exploitation. They are paid as low as 99 cents per hour. The Human Rights Commission has granted the Federal Government's request to delay reform for a further four months because the government says the the ending of discrimination must proceed in an 'orderly manner...to provide reassurance'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In the uncomfortably quiet streets

    • John Falzon
    • 16 June 2015
    4 Comments

    Streets like the streets in Blue Velvet or Land of the Giants. I think I may have been the only poet.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Finding an antidote to populism

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 June 2015
    12 Comments

    In ancient Greece the relative merits of autocracy, oligarchy and democracy as a framework for wise governance were widely discussed. But the dreaded elephant in the room was always ochlocracy — mob rule. Populism has shades of the triumph of the mob over the wisdom that, say, a philosopher king might provide. The development of representative democracy can be seen as the simultaneous taming and incorporation of the mob into governance.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Australian Muslim' is not an oxymoron

    • Somayra Ismailjee
    • 15 June 2015
    16 Comments

    There is a particular anatomy to the process of othering. In any context, the formula consists of propaganda, hatred, division, suppression and control. I'm from Perth. Some people would dispute this due to my brown skin and non-Anglo name. But I was born here, and have lived here for my entire life. Still, people like me are too often considered Australian only by law, and not by sociocultural connotation.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Italian perspective on Australia's asylum seeker shame

    • Anna Martin
    • 12 June 2015
    31 Comments

    Over the last few months, I have been completing a Masters in International Criminal Law at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute in Turin, Italy. Over the last two weeks, our classes revolved around human rights — always a bit of a cringeworthy topic when one comes from Australia. Certainly Italy's attitude and approach to asylum seekers puts Australia's to shame.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Do working mums raise better boys?

    • Jen Vuk
    • 12 June 2015
    3 Comments

    Not only are we working mothers providing a leg up for our daughters, helping shape a new, improved, domestic male, and paving the way for stronger, adaptable, more spiritually-attuned human beings, but perhaps we're also part of a new thinking that's redefining and reassessing what success will look like in the future. Having a mother who not only goes to work, but works from home, I hope my sons grow into men who will have insightful and supportive relationships with the women in their lives.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Missing girls expose town's threadbare soul

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 June 2015

    World-weary detectives Juan and Pedro arrive in an agrarian township on Spain's Guadalquivir Marshes to investigate the disappearance of two teenage sisters. But their investigation among the town's various innocents, eccentrics and reprobates uncovers a much larger, sinister burr within the very soul of the town. The smell of fascism lingers thickly in the air.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Royal Commission hatred is childish

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 June 2015
    30 Comments

    In my early years of secondary school there was a fine footballer in the senior team of another school. I had never met him, but I hated him with a passion. This memory returned in recent weeks when reading of the vilification of Adam Goodes, and some of the opinion pieces on the Ballarat sexual abuse. Hatred avoids questions by trying to obliterate those whose lives pose them to us.

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  • CARTOON

    Border Farce crime and punishment

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 10 June 2015

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Living and flourishing with quadriplegia

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 10 June 2015
    4 Comments

    In October 2010, shortly before his 40th birthday, Pentecostal pastor and theologian Shane Clifton rode a bike at high speed off a ramp and into a pit of foam rubber. When he landed, he fractured his spine, severed his spinal cord, and became a quadriplegic. He was forced to ponder deeply his beliefs and doubts, strengths and weaknesses, and the possibility of flourishing in the midst of human suffering.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    South China Sea dispute exposes soft Australia

    • Fatima Measham
    • 10 June 2015
    9 Comments

    The trajectory of the conflict over territory in the South China Sea does not look good. There is no reason to believe that the United States would relinquish its position as an Asia-Pacific security power. There is also no reason to believe that China would slow or halt its island-building and militarisation of the South China Sea. Against this ponderous milieu, it is a pity that Australia has again been exposed as a lightweight.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Management thinking in schools is a bad business

    • David James
    • 09 June 2015
    19 Comments

    Allowing such a flimsy discipline as management to co-opt an area as important as education, as appears to be the trend, is as absurd as it is saddening. Education has been with us for thousands of years and encompasses some of the most profound thinking the civilisation has produced. Management thinking has been with us for a few decades and has accomplished next to nothing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Could Immigration 'secrecy' act trump mandatory reporting of abuse?

    • Justin Glyn
    • 09 June 2015
    6 Comments

    All Australian states and territories have mandatory reporting legislation requiring compulsory disclosure of suspected child abuse by relevant professionals. The Australian Border Force Act requires the permission of the Secretary before any disclosure of criminal conduct is made to the relevant authorities. Should an Immigration professional who works with children fulfil their mandatory reporting obligations if this permission is not granted (and face two years in prison) or not?

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