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Vol 27 No 16

14 August 2017


 

  • AUSTRALIA

    Too many words about same sex marriage

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 24 August 2017
    73 Comments

    Lots of words have already been said and typed about the subject of same sex marriage. Too many, frankly. But it seems that the marriage equality debate will not go away nor be resolved easily, though LGBTI advocates have said that the homophobic anti-same sex marriage campaign will be damaging to the mental health of LGBTI people. Of course, the very idea that civil rights should be put to a public vote is demoralising.

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  • RELIGION

    It seems Mother Teresa was a Mother Teresa after all

    • Tony Thompson
    • 24 August 2017
    14 Comments

    I kept getting lost in Kolkata. North and south were somehow inverted in my head and I had to consciously avoid going the wrong way every time I stepped out of my hotel.

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  • RELIGION

    Do we ban the nun's veil next?

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 24 August 2017
    29 Comments

    For an item of clothing that virtually no Australian Muslims wear, the burqa sure gets plenty of airtime. I've never seen the (usually blue) all-enveloping cloak with the small material grill for sale in any of the bricks-and-mortar Islamic clothing stores I've visited. Short of travelling to Afghanistan, the only place I can think where an anti-Islam protester might get one is by searching Halloween costume listings on eBay or Etsy.

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  • MEDIA

    We treat dogs better than the asylum seekers

    • 23 August 2017
    10 Comments

    Last week I was rung to say my dog was missing. I finished at work as soon as I could, ringing the local council and neighbourhood vet on the way home. Neither had seen anything of him but suggested we post on social media. As my husband and I drove and walked the streets, the messages came in. People were concerned. He was missing from an enclosed yard. Some offered to look, others from further away, shared hope and the Facebook post. The post went everywhere, the last I saw was in Western Australia.  

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  • ECONOMICS

    World trade is now America versus China (and Russia)

    • David James
    • 23 August 2017
    4 Comments

    The anti-Russian frenzy in the United States amounts to little more than a great deal of evidence that the intelligence community suspects there might be a great deal of evidence that the Russians have been meddling. It has to rank as one of the biggest, and most orchestrated, blind alleys of modern media coverage. When a journalist says an anonymous ‘respected source’ thinks the Russians are up to something, this writer is always left wondering: respected by whom? His dog?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The beloved countries are still crying

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 August 2017
    9 Comments

    Seventy years ago Alan Paton wrote Cry the Beloved Country. His novel opened many Australians’ eyes to the wounded South Africa that lay behind its colonial surface. His elegiac conclusion was prescient of the two generations that followed.

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  • CARTOON

    The citizenship conundrum

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 22 August 2017
    2 Comments

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

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tomatoes, harbour

    • Rory Harris
    • 22 August 2017
    1 Comment

    tomatoes you fade into the hospital white above your head a row of floral Hallmark cards as a husband’s garden once filled every available backyard space with colour the glasshouse arrived after retirement

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  • RELIGION

    Being clear about orphans

    • Brian Lucas
    • 22 August 2017
    7 Comments

    In the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 August Lindsay Murdoch reported on the public hearing by the Australian Parliament’s Joint Committee investigating a Modern Slavery Act. The proposed legislation is broad but this article focused on one aspect—the institutionalisation of children. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    Why musicians are the canaries in the coal mine

    • Terry Noone
    • 21 August 2017
    9 Comments

    To get a good idea of where employment practices are headed, a good place to start is the music industry. Musicians have been the canary in the coalmine. The gradual removal of their work place rights, and even basic remuneration, points to what happens when there are no effective constraints on employers’ behaviour. Instead, they are being offered ‘exposure’—and, as one muso quips, ‘you can die of exposure.’

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The twisted priorities of the same-sex marriage vote

    • Rohan Salmond
    • 21 August 2017
    53 Comments

    Same-sex marriage, the government tells us, is not a first-order issue. And yet it has grown to become a controversy so monumental it has overshadowed even the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why the seal of the confessional will remain

    • Frank Brennan
    • 20 August 2017
    23 Comments

    The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has published a 2000-page three volume Criminal Justice Report. One of its recommendations is that the states and territories 'create a criminal offence of failure to report targeted at child sexual abuse in an institutional context'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The lessons learned from charitable work

    • Mariana James-Techera
    • 19 August 2017
    4 Comments

    We students go to school to learn. But one of the best learning experiences for me has happened outside school: helping the less fortunate by serving them food at the Sacred Heart Mission and collecting food necessities for the charity.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The renewables debate is won, but we may still lose the war

    • Greg Foyster
    • 17 August 2017
    9 Comments

    In the last few years, vested interests have changed their strategy for opposing action on climate change. Where they once focused on denying the problem, they’re now putting their efforts into sabotaging the solutions. Instead of funding fake experts to say the ‘science isn’t settled’, fossil fuel companies and their political backers have been running a smear campaign against renewable energy technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Getting some perspective on Charlottesville

    • Fatima Measham
    • 17 August 2017
    15 Comments

    Instead of refining his initial remarks about a Nazi rally in Charlottesville, which brutally claimed the life of a counter-protester, Donald Trump has doubled down. At a heated news conference in New York, he demanded that journalists define 'alt-right', invoked the idea of an 'alt-left', and lay blame on 'both sides'.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Of murderers, bastards and inequality: neo-liberalism's failure

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 August 2017
    18 Comments

    Cometh the hour, cometh the third murderer. So now inequality is in the spotlight and is being booed off the stage. It is blamed for the rise of populist politics, and more fundamentally for economic stagnation. The economic neo-liberal orthodoxy, that so implausibly claimed that economic competition unfettered by government regulation would benefit all of the citizens, has produced the gross inequality that hinders economic growth. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David v Goliath in the beautiful British countryside

    • Megan Graham
    • 16 August 2017

    One lone man daring to interfere with the evil plans of the rich and powerful: it’s not exactly a new angle, but there are a few scraps of satisfaction to be found in Joel Hopkin’s latest film Hampstead – just not in the realm of originality. It’s a sleepy story that meanders along with a mildly pleasant mediocrity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The high political stakes of same sex marriage

    • John Warhurst
    • 16 August 2017
    40 Comments

    The same sex marriage postal plebiscite will be as intense as most referendum and election campaigns. Indeed, the special characteristics of this subject, advanced by the government as the reason for going beyond parliamentary means to resolve the issue, mean that the campaign may be more intense than most referendums have been.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What Philippines' president Duterte is telling us about China

    • Daniel Kleinsman
    • 16 August 2017
    4 Comments

      Reckless machoism is the trademark of President Rodrigo Duterte. He has vowed to stop at nothing in his bloody war against drugs and dissidents, and is unapologetic about increasing casualities incurred. Meanwhile, he demonstrates a terrifying disregard for anyone who opposes his agenda, and he delights in doing so.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The rationality of Kim Jong Un

    • Justin Glyn
    • 15 August 2017
    12 Comments

    The ongoing talk of war with North Korea and the threat of nuclear weapons has everybody dusting off their copies of Dr Strangelove and rewatching that classic black farce of innuendo, misunderstanding and paranoia in an age of Mutually Assured Destruction.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Solitaire and Some souls

    • Margaret Quigley and Edith Speers
    • 15 August 2017

    Were I to call Were I to stumble  Or even fall  Would you hear me?  Would the constant babble  Of texts and tweets and twitters  Silence my helpless cry

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  • RELIGION

    Confessions of a literature addict

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 14 August 2017
    12 Comments

    Was Harry Potter’s 20th birthday to blame? Or the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death? Or merely the ageing process? It’s hard to decide, but in a life quite possibly ruined by literature, I have started remembering some of the books I read in childhood.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Using ignorance to know if mandatory drug testing laws are sound

    • Daniel Fleming
    • 14 August 2017
    16 Comments

    Sometimes ignorance can be a virtue in political decision-making. The great 20th century political philosopher John Rawls had a thought experiment called the “Veil of Ignorance” which he suggested should be applied to any political decision to test whether or not it is just. 

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