Vol 28 No 11

04 June 2018

DOWNLOAD PDF

EDUCATION

Academics tangle with managerial oppressors
- David James
- 14 June 2018
15 Comments
The imposition of 'managerialism' or 'marketisation' on universities is disastrous. So why are academics so passive when their working lives are being immiserated by the imposition of ideas, mostly derived from business or economics, that are either patently false or poor?
READ MORE
PODCAST

Christine Carolan on curbing modern slavery
- Podcast
- 14 June 2018
What does modern slavery look like? What facilitates it? What can be done to protect human beings from such exploitation? In this episode, we talk to the national executive officer of Australian Catholic Religious against Trafficking in Humans (ACRATH). Christine Carolan.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Coming out is still a big deal
- Neve Mahoney
- 13 June 2018
13 Comments
No LGBT+ person can be certain how someone else is going to react. When I came out, I felt like I was risking my relationships. Whenever someone who didn't know about my sexuality told me they loved or cared for me, I mentally added a 'but': 'But that might not be true after I tell you.'
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Triggs champions common compassion
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 June 2018
16 Comments
In the 1930s a Jewish Australian was trying to bring to Australia a Jewish family who were in grave danger in Austria. Asked by immigration what made him want to bring the family of his daughter's pen friend, none of whom he had ever met, he replied, 'Common compassion.' The family could not come, and most were later killed.
READ MORE
CARTOON

His brilliant Korea
- Fiona Katauskas
- 12 June 2018
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Stop maiming the gift of Aboriginal languages
- Celeste Liddle
- 12 June 2018
17 Comments
As I watched the debacle over the ill-advised Meanjin cover last week, I couldn't help but reflect on Aboriginal languages and how, when our words or histories do come to the forefront, they're continually disrespected or treated as a massive threat to the white patriarchal status quo. Meanjin is only the latest example.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Outback Australia after the plague
- Tim Kroenert
- 12 June 2018
With the downfall of white society, Thoomi and other Aboriginal people have abandoned their white-established communities, to return to the land. Through embracing ancient communal practices, they are proving far more resilient than their white counterparts. It is through them that Andy may ultimately discover the key to survival.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Family diversity brings new reasons to feast
- Amy Thunig
- 08 June 2018
4 Comments
While we now lived in a less ethnically diverse region, our working-class, Indigenous Australian family grew more diverse. I was 12 when my sister Jay began to express an interest in Islam. That Christmas it was decided that to be more inclusive of her faith, the leg of ham would be taken off of the lunch menu. I raged against this decision.
READ MORE
ENVIRONMENT

Will veganism save the planet?
- Cristy Clark
- 08 June 2018
13 Comments
Researchers from Oxford concluded that consumers have significant power to 'deliver environmental benefits on a scale not achievable by producers' by excluding animal products from their diets. Interestingly, this report comes at a time when the uptake of veganism is growing significantly, both globally and in Australia.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

ANU right to be wary of 'supremacist' centre
- Fatima Measham
- 07 June 2018
60 Comments
The Ramsay Centre was an agenda-laden venture at the outset. It has now been left hanging after ANU withdrew from negotiations, with Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt saying that a difference of vision led to the decision. The Ramsay Centre's focus on western 'civilisation' was never neutral to begin with. The people involved gives that away.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Fractured family in the house of grief
- Tim Kroenert
- 06 June 2018
1 Comment
The pressure starts to get to Annie when she begins to suspect her mother is haunting her. This exacerbates pre-existing tensions; her husband is caring in a mildly condescending way, but is more concerned with the wellbeing of their children. Is the haunting real, then, or just a symptom of Annie's reluctance to let go?
READ MORE
EDUCATION

How schools funding became such a problem
- Andrew Hamilton
- 06 June 2018
16 Comments
Tony Taylor's study of the funding of Australian schools from the time when Menzies first aided Catholic schools until today explains how school funding has come to pose such an intractable problem for governments. It is also a lament for so many lost opportunities to build an educational framework that would open opportunity to all.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Never again locked out by whiteness
- Yen-Rong Wong
- 05 June 2018
26 Comments
People have always had issues with my name. They don't pronounce it properly, or want to give me a nickname, or straight up make jokes out of it. I've lived a life of people telling me my name was too different, too hard. One afternoon at the office of my real estate agent, whiteness once again wanted to erase my name.
READ MORE
INTERNATIONAL

Care work, participation and the politics of time
- Lizzie O'Shea
- 05 June 2018
1 Comment
Many people, including on the left, talk about the centrality of work to our sense of purpose and dignity. Work is commonly understood as the method through which we acquire income, a sense of identity, make a contribution and find community, but for many, it has also become an extremely unreliable source of these things.
READ MORE
CARTOON

By popular demand
- Fiona Katauskas
- 05 June 2018
READ MORE
RELIGION

Do pro-life Australians need a new approach?
- Ann Deslandes
- 04 June 2018
56 Comments
The result in Ireland is a timely reminder to political and/or church leaders in Australia who like to use Irish Catholic heritage as a way to defend their conservative views. On nearly all issues that have been debated by Australian Catholics against their religious obligations, the motherland is, clearly, no longer the source of moral legitimacy.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Submission to the elements
- Tony London
- 04 June 2018
4 Comments
Winter fronts roll through, we have had our tongues out for rain, genuflected in case it may have helped, and now another scud rattling on the tin roof, gutters run over like a gushing bereavement.
READ MORE
EDUCATION

Voluntourism hinders community development
- Beth Doherty
- 01 June 2018
13 Comments
More and more, school leavers are being invited to participate in 'life-changing' experiences where they build houses in Cambodia, or volunteer for a week in a Vietnamese orphanage. When presented with such opportunities we should exercise caution and informed discernment.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Kafka comes to Nauru
- Harold Zwier
- 01 June 2018
19 Comments
The first two shipments we sent to Nauru were sent with some assistance from individuals in Immigration who saw what we were doing as a good thing. Well, that's what we thought. By the second shipment, the letters from Australian school children mysteriously disappeared no one was willing to own up on the who and why.
READ MORE
INTERNATIONAL

Mexico 'narco-graves' mark a national crisis
- Antonio Castillo
- 31 May 2018
7 Comments
In Mexico, every two hours a person vanishes. Most likely they are executed and thrown into narco-fosas, the term given to the thousands of clandestine graves used by narco-organised crime to bury their victims. Most of the victims are young. More than 46,000 young people were killed between 2007 and 2016.
READ MORE

Subscriber login

Vol 28 No 11