Vol 29 No 19

22 September 2019

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CARTOON

More powerful than a Scomomotive
- Fiona Katauskas
- 01 October 2019
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INTERNATIONAL

While Thunberg creates hope, Trump stymies it
- Jim McDermott
- 01 October 2019
10 Comments
When Nancy Pelosi announced the House of Representatives would open impeachment proceedings, it seemed that finally the Trump Administration would be forced to reckon with its repeated disregard for the rule of law. Except, as Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson says in a hilarious sketch, 'Ain't nothin' gonna happen.'
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AUSTRALIA

History repeating in lacklustre NDIS regime
- El Gibbs
- 01 October 2019
4 Comments
The latest underspend of the NDIS budget has reached the eye-popping amount of $4.6 billion. Every single one of these dollars is a dollar not getting to disabled people. Every single dollar represents change not being delivered. It's a door being closed, a phone call not being answered. This is getting worse, not better.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Literature's power is in self not identity
- Mark Tredinnick
- 30 September 2019
11 Comments
I'm a white man in a white man's world, his mother tongue the lingua franca everywhere. I may not be rich, but I am more or less free, and my calling has let me travel the world. It's easy for me, not having had to fight for mine, to ask us to go deeper than identity when we write. But when James Baldwin says the same thing, it compels.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Headland daydreaming
- Peter Ramm
- 30 September 2019
2 Comments
This place is new to my son, who doesn't know that satin bowerbirds pilfer the brush ... He's busy tracing each scribble in each gum, and my hands are full of his hands, faintly heavy — faintly delicate. A towering deciduous fig hangs over us; its branches are neural pathways, thin at their tips the way memories thin in time.
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INTERNATIONAL

Seeking balance in diverse Indonesia
- Devana Senanayake
- 30 September 2019
4 Comments
With Widowo's decision to reconsider the proposed updates, policymakers should seek to initiate balanced and nuanced reforms that help liberal lifestyles and conservative values coexist. While appeasing the conservative portion of the electorate is a good tactic, ignoring a diverse electorate is a recipe for disaster in the long term.
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RELIGION

Pope answers policies that suffocate hope
- Andrew Hamilton
- 30 September 2019
10 Comments
The Pope's speech was newsworthy because in Australia sentences to a lifetime in prison without parole are becoming less contentious and more used. His approach to prisoners and their criminal behaviour is in such strong contrast to strands of Australian culture in which exclusion and the denial of hope are an instinctive response.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

My September of grief
- Katherine Richardson
- 26 September 2019
8 Comments
Before that first September, my experience with grief was fairly limited. I was no stranger to death, but I hadn't yet felt the type of grief that makes you ache in places you never realised sadness could reach. My first experience with this was September 2014.
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AUSTRALIA

My brush with robodebt
- Bree Alexander
- 26 September 2019
2 Comments
I was heartened by the announcement Gordon Legal is pursuing a class action for robodebt victims. I am one of hundreds of thousands of people who has gone through the robodebt process. I too felt the exercise of a reverse burden of proof; guilty until proven innocent.
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ENVIRONMENT

Existential lessons from road kill
- Cristy Clark
- 26 September 2019
6 Comments
In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains that we have placed animals in a lethal double bind: they have to move due to the effects of climate change and habitat destruction, but their pathways are blocked by roads or occupied by humans. Some might ask why this mass extinction should matter to us, but we ignore it at our peril.
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AUSTRALIA

Reframing aspiration as a collective force
- John Falzon
- 26 September 2019
13 Comments
We're taught to think that aspiration means what you do alone, what sets you apart. As such it is a concept that is both lauded and loaded. Aspiration, neoliberal style, is a secular version of the gospel of prosperity so loved by the prime minister. God, or the Market, smiles on those who aspire to greater things.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Breaking through one dimensional seeing
- John Cranmer
- 25 September 2019
4 Comments
i am a dinosaur / old fogie off with pixies / poor old dodder-bloke! / i grow wings and fly ... telling my song-story / you would put me in my box?
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Conscientious capitalists
- Gillian Bouras
- 24 September 2019
6 Comments
Raised by Politically Pink Parents, I was in my youth rather wary and suspicious of capitalism and capitalists. Eventually I realised that the only thing wrong with money is that not everyone has enough of it. We hear too much about arch-capitalists like the Trumps and the Koch brothers.
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ECONOMICS

Capitalism isn’t dead, it just smells funny
- David James
- 24 September 2019
9 Comments
It is easy to blame the financial sector — and the governments that were supposed to oversee the financial system but instead just washed their hands of it — for creating this global debt debauch. They certainly bear much of the responsibility. But in many ways the financial misbehaviour is as much symptom as cause.
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CARTOON

SorryNotSorry
- Fiona Katauskas
- 24 September 2019
1 Comment
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ENVIRONMENT

Nothing childish about student climate strikers
- Andrew Hamilton
- 23 September 2019
25 Comments
Reflection on the demonstration and the criticisms made of it prompts a more radical and subversive question. Who actually were the adults here? When assessed by conventional wisdom about the path from childhood to adulthood, it might seem that supposed adults were behaving like children and children like adults.
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ENVIRONMENT

After the climate strike
- Bronwyn Lay
- 23 September 2019
11 Comments
These strikes aren't solely sites of protestation but rather a chance to step out of the individual grey loneliness to come together for our collective future in intergenerational solidarity. There is something powerful and visceral about putting your body on the street, in the public forum, with other bodies and being vulnerable together.
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AUSTRALIA

Playing God with the Tamil family's fate
- Kerry Murphy
- 23 September 2019
8 Comments
Last week the Federal Court granted an interim injunction to a child born in Australia preventing her removal from Australia. The case raises complex issues regarding the statutory bars preventing asylum seekers from even making any application at all, and the exercise of the ministerial discretion to lift that bar.
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ENVIRONMENT

Climate protest is existential
- Tim Robertson
- 20 September 2019
5 Comments
Anyone at Friday's climate strike couldn't help but notice just how much the terms of the debate have shifted in recent years. The crisis is one of being. Climate change denialism isn't simply a political position anymore. To deny the science is to embrace nihilism; it is to be complicit in one's own extinction.
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INTERNATIONAL

US gun culture and travel advisories
- Catherine Marshall
- 13 September 2019
3 Comments
The attack, and the travel advisories it prompted, was disquieting: I'd visited El Paso before, had driven from there all along the Mexican border to the remote artists' refuge of Marfa. Now I was about to embark on a journey through New Mexico, and onwards through a different part of Texas. I'd never relied on travel advisories before.
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Vol 29 No 19