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Vol 30 No 23

15 November 2020


 

  • INTERNATIONAL

    The lives of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees are still at risk

    • Peter Coghlan
    • 26 November 2020
    11 Comments

    The continued persecution of Tamils has led to many fleeing Sri Lanka over the past ten years, with some landing on Australia’s shores — they have literally fled for their lives. The Australian government’s response to the inhumane treatment of refugees returned to Sri Lanka has been to praise the Sri Lankan government’s efforts to thwart any asylum seeker attempt to leave Sri Lanka.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Are we respecting our elders?

    • Cristy Clark
    • 26 November 2020
    5 Comments

    This past weekend, I visited my grandparents in their residential aged care home. As usual, it was both lovely and utterly heartbreaking. Lovely, because I feel so lucky to be able to spend time with them, that they are still alive, their home is accepting visitors, and they still remember who I am. But, also, heartbreaking, because aging is tough, and living in residential aged care is tougher still, and this year, well, this year has made it all so much harder.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Jesuit Refugee Service: '40 years of accompaniment'

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 November 2020
    7 Comments

    Stories of volunteers who went to help in foreign crises used to focus on the impact on the people helped. Today they explore how both parties are changed through the experience. That was also true in Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) whose 40th anniversary occurred last week.

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  • RELIGION

    Halima Aden and shaping one's own hijab journey

    • Najma Sambul
    • 26 November 2020
    8 Comments

    Aden was a first and a trailblazer for a group of people who before her were long ignored in the mainstream fashion industry. She has many regrets and admits she made mistakes, but for a fresh-faced teenager who was given this huge responsibility, she says, she did good. I say different, she did bloody brilliant.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The shadow of responsibility: Australian war crimes allegations in Afghanistan

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 November 2020
    21 Comments

    The discussion in Australia as to how such atrocities are to be approached is telling. The call for responsibility has varied by degrees. Most tend to some variant of the rotten apple theory: a few particularly fruits that may be isolated and extruded from the barrel. Culpability can thereby be confined, preserving the integrity of other military personnel and, importantly, political decision makers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tis the times' plague

    • Brian Matthews
    • 24 November 2020
    5 Comments

    In measures now sadly familiar in 2020, theatres were closed once the number of weekly deaths exceeded 30, later 40, but because actors and the theatre world itself were so economically vulnerable, actors, understandably intent on earning a living, soon legally or otherwise cut themselves some slack by taking liberties with the rules governing performances and quarantine — again, a phenomenon that is now, against all previous odds, familiar to people of 2020.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Or else an eagle

    • John Allison
    • 24 November 2020
    4 Comments

    You are transfixed, steering your car but so captive to the bird’s powerful flight that you could readily follow it as it breaks away and lifts above the forest into the setting sun. Sometimes you do not want it to end. The eagle soars into the light. Away and up into the sky. And here is the corner, down towards the dirt road leading home. You are there.

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  • CARTOON

    The unhelping hand

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 24 November 2020

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  • MEDIA

    Media matters for the good of the Church

    • Peter Donnan
    • 19 November 2020
    66 Comments

    Author Gideon Goosen estimates the percentage of those involved in reform groups in Australia is 5 per cent or less. Given the passivity of the laity, his view is that reform proponents should seek to engage the 40 to 45 per cent who might change their thinking. What forums or media, with sufficient audience reach and influence, facilitate respectful discussion of change in the Catholic Church?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Biden's middle class in a divided America

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 19 November 2020
    9 Comments

    The priority given to the middle class was not new — Biden stressed it in speeches through the primaries and again as a candidate. And it is no doubt important. But when seen in the light of the passionate polarisation of the campaign, the closeness of the results, and the continuing mutual antipathy of the supporters of each party, rebuilding the middle class seems an unlikely source of healing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Breaking the glass ceiling in Australian elite sport

    • Erin Riley
    • 17 November 2020
    6 Comments

    If the up-and-across path isn’t available, it makes it all the more important that there are sufficient development opportunities within sports in Australia. Unfortunately, as women’s professional sport has grown in Australia, fewer women have been given coaching roles.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Overhauling economics to combat climate crisis

    • David James
    • 17 November 2020
    5 Comments

    There is a common error about economics that, if not corrected, has far reaching consequences. It is the widely held belief that economic growth and consumption are the same. They are not.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A new stage in fight against radioactive waste bill

    • Michele Madigan
    • 17 November 2020
    9 Comments

    So in the long journey of nearly five years since the Australian federal government's renewed search for a national radioactive waste facility, it seems a new stage has been reached.

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  • CARTOON

    Algorithm and blues

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 17 November 2020
    1 Comment

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