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Vol 30 No 10

17 May 2020


 

  • ECONOMICS

    The flawed ideology of healthcare as business

    • David James
    • 28 May 2020
    5 Comments

    Calling healthcare a business was always logically flawed. Money is involved, but it is unlike any consumer product businesses. For one thing, the ‘customer’ in health does not decide what represents value, the provider (the doctor or equivalent) does. Patients may have a say, but usually only on the margin.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Seeing the con in reconciliation

    • Celeste Liddle
    • 28 May 2020
    12 Comments

    Reconciliation week itself begins on the 27th May, the anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, which granted Aboriginal people the right to be counted in the census. The anniversary of the Mabo ruling in the High Court rounds out the week. Yet every year, I would swear that this week means nothing more to most people in this country than to call on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their workplaces and community to do more work.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Insecurity in a COVID world

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 May 2020
    6 Comments

    But insecurity breeds insecurity. In the face of insecurity we can feel insecure. Our identity as persons can be shaken by the insecurity of our circumstances. This is not inevitable. Nor is it necessarily lasting. Some people will be temporarily or lastingly paralysed by anxiety; others will be more resilient.

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  • CARTOON

    The political science is in

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 26 May 2020

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How they floated in the clouds

    • Geoff Page
    • 25 May 2020
    4 Comments

    Ah, how they floated in the clouds, back before the first world war, those decent heady phrases: the common good, the living wage and how they came across the seas, those writers and professors, to study what we’d done down here.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Vicarious

    • Martin Pike
    • 25 May 2020
    24 Comments

    At the fringes of the legal system, there are areas of work you probably won’t read about in law school career guides. Many of these deal in trauma or poverty. They are substantial, but they aren’t celebrated or pursued by the mainstream of the profession. They generally attract neither money nor prestige, and in many cases the ‘market’ fails to provide paid jobs of any sort, irrespective of need.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Social services, Laudato Si’ and Jack Mundey’s legacy

    • Joshua Lourensz
    • 22 May 2020
    6 Comments

    In thinking through how social services can contribute to what society or the economy needs in light of the ramifications of COVID-19, Catholicism and communism are not two traditions that probably come to the mind for most. But for the kind of thinking that governance and leaders require to make good decisions in and beyond a time of crisis, there are people and concepts from each tradition that we can learn from.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Going big picture with Malcolm Turnbull

    • Barry Gittins
    • 22 May 2020
    17 Comments

    As the small-l Liberal who attempted unsuccessfully to stare down the right-wing of the Liberal Party, known to his enemies as ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’ or as the best Labour Prime Minister to ever lead the Liberal Party (2015-2018), Malcolm Bligh Turnbull was a man who dreamed, spoke and spent big.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The girls are exaggerating

    • Jennifer Zeven
    • 22 May 2020
    13 Comments

    I spent the first six or seven years of my life spellbound by my mum’s stories of her childhood in Far North Queensland. Herstory came from warm, outback and subtropical places. She and her sisters wrote on slates at school, played in custard apple trees, kept their own bees.

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  • INFORMATION

    Letter from Eureka Street

    • Eureka Street
    • 22 May 2020
    9 Comments

    Letter from Eureka Street.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Navigating the COVIDSafe app rhetoric

    • Samantha Floreani
    • 21 May 2020
    8 Comments

    Over the past few weeks we’ve seen the government pull out all the stops in an attempt to convince the Australian public to download the COVIDSafe App. There are plenty of issues with the app itself, including its technical flaws, and valid concerns around data privacy, security and the normalisation of surveillance. But the other fascinating aspect of COVIDSafe has been the commentary surrounding the app. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The importance of connections

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 May 2020
    7 Comments

    In recovering from catastrophic events, we need to look beyond the simple defining of problems, finding solutions that match them and naming agencies responsible to fix them. We need to be curious about the persons involved, their interlocking relationships which have contributed to the trauma and the possibilities for healing within those relationships.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A new pay structure for frontliners

    • Jill Sutton
    • 20 May 2020
    10 Comments

    Our frontliners are usually our younger workers. They are the ones trying to pay rent or save a deposit on a house. They are the ones trying to cope with children, the costs of child care and space for their accommodation and play. And yet we depend on them in a crisis like COVID-19, and we pay them less.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian politics out of hibernation

    • John Warhurst
    • 20 May 2020
    8 Comments

    Politics in the best sense is returning to normal. To do so it first needs the federal parliament, which should not have been filleted in the first place, to be fully functioning. More will then follow.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Demanding more sustainable businesses

    • Alana Schetzer
    • 19 May 2020
    3 Comments

    Multiple media reports have focused on individuals and households moving away from sustainability — mostly because of understandable concerns about contamination — and yet, the conversation about the impacts of our biggest businesses and corporations hasn’t been as loud.

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  • CARTOON

    Seven years and counting

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 19 May 2020
    1 Comment

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The bone attic

    • Paul Williamson
    • 19 May 2020
    1 Comment

    The dweller in the bone attic holds countryside as home; thinks of food, safety, health and warmth for family, self and group. Frenetic scuffles rage in the brick canyons where the hunt is commerce and food constructed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Dutton's ASIO bill goes Kafkaesque

    • Justin Glyn
    • 18 May 2020
    42 Comments

    The new ASIO Powers Amendment Bill 2020 is being rushed through Parliament in a time of pandemic, guaranteeing that it will lack even the minimal level of scrutiny normally accorded to legislation dealing with ‘national security’.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Blaming and buying

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 18 May 2020
    13 Comments

    Nothing in the world is single, as Shelley said, and we have proof of this in the general reaction to COVID-19. That spirit, however, seems to have its limitations. For some politicians are set on dividing people, rather than on uniting them.

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