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Vol 30 No 7

05 April 2020


 

  • ENVIRONMENT

    World Mother Earth Day as a time to reflect

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 April 2020
    9 Comments

    World Mother Earth Day, held on 22nd April, expanded the earlier focus on the natural environment as distinct from human beings by seeing them as dependent on and nurtured by it. It teased out the relationships that placed human beings within the natural world.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our not so distant past

    • Tim Robertson
    • 17 April 2020
    9 Comments

    I can’t be the only one who has, in recent weeks, found myself reaching for my dog-eared copy of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional re-telling of the 1665 great plague of London.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Protecting our right to online freedoms

    • Marta Achler
    • 16 April 2020
    2 Comments

    The internet and the online spaces are indeed becoming our lifeline for expression and assembly. This lifeline is under threat and deserves much more protection than it currently has under international law. We now have an immediate opportunity to remedy that.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Right to Know still has a long way to go

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 16 April 2020
    4 Comments

    The opacity of the Australian public service, and its disposition to secrecy, has left journalists in a bind. Leaks constitute the oxygen of the secret state, but publishing that material remains a dangerous affair.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Masking anxiety, showing care

    • Kate Galloway
    • 15 April 2020
    5 Comments

    Who knew that the greatest moral debate of our time would be whether or not to wear a mask? Having sewed my first mask many weeks ago, I’ve been following the millions of words written and spoken on the efficacy of masks, whether to wear them, who should wear them, how to use them, and how to make them. In a genre that is already bending my brain, there is a special sub-category of mask-shaming.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Good news from Greece

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 April 2020
    17 Comments

    In these troubled times of COVID-19, most news bulletins concentrate on the daunting figures from Italy, Spain, Britain and the USA. Little countries don’t get much of a mention. Greece is a little country.

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  • CARTOON

    Silver linings

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 14 April 2020
    1 Comment

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  • EDUCATION

    Teachers asked to turn on a dime

    • Tim Hutton
    • 14 April 2020
    17 Comments

    I don't want to sound too ungrateful, because there isn't a playbook for this scenario, but if all it took to build a passable digital schooling ecosystem was a week of hard work, we'd have done it long ago. We haven't been asked to turn on a dime, we've been asked to pirouette.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The joy of one step after the other

    • Angela Costi
    • 14 April 2020
    4 Comments

    She is sitting on the edge of a mountain in the Annapurna, her face, away from the camera, her gaze, focused on the Lamjung peak, experiencing a moment of peace like many before and many after. The seconds could be hours could be days, the weather could be challenging or kind, she could be alone or surrounded by trekkers. It has taken careful hoarding of time and money to be sitting there framed by sky and snow.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Let's not snap back but spring forward

    • John Falzon
    • 10 April 2020
    25 Comments

    Already the ideological die-hards of neoliberalism are working out how the pandemic might be manipulated to lower wages and to snap back to the old economic normal. So now is when collectively we need to take over the framing and the forming of the future. Not to snap back but to spring forward.

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  • RELIGION

    Easter as an enduring story of loss and hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 April 2020
    15 Comments

    In Christian churches the celebration of Easter this year will look more like Lent or Passion week. All Australians, too, will be without football, concerts, interstate and international travel and family gatherings. The atmosphere, too, will be one of constraint, not freedom. Instead of celebrating the present, we may be weighed down by fear and anxiety about the future. We are all captive to COVID-19.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    When normal returns, what do we want it to be?

    • Cristy Clark
    • 09 April 2020
    9 Comments

    Even during this period of disruption (and, indeed, even because of it) it is so important that we pay attention to the bigger picture. So much of what we do now will lay the groundwork for the kind of future that we are able to build at end of this crisis.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Prisoners need action now facing COVID-19

    • Julie Edwards
    • 09 April 2020
    6 Comments

    We know that prisons are pressure cooker environments at the best of times. We can’t let them also become sites of mass infection, with potentially grave consequences, during the current COVID-19 health crisis. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Can't go home if there's no home to go to

    • Danusia Kaska
    • 08 April 2020
    5 Comments

    The COVID-19 pandemic came swiftly and without any warning to turn our lives upside down. But while many of us are living the routine of our lives very differently now, people who are homeless or those at risk of homelessness are experiencing this pandemic in an acutely difficult way.

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  • RELIGION

    Prayer and community during COVID-19

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 08 April 2020
    17 Comments

    For millions of Australians of varying degrees of religiosity, prayer will play a key role in dealing with the novel stresses associated with this novel virus. Religions bring us not just closer to our creator but also to each other, especially in times of crisis. And you don’t have to be devout to feel the blessing.

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  • CARTOON

    Their brilliant careers

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 07 April 2020

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Lives over politics for Palestinians

    • Andra Jackson
    • 07 April 2020
    8 Comments

    After almost 14 years under an Israel imposed economic blockade, as well as coming under bombing, most recently on the 27th of March, Gaza is struggling. Medical and food supplies are rundown, many houses are in ruins, power is intermittent, and there are water quality and sanitation issues.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Summertime in drought

    • Jeremy Gadd
    • 07 April 2020
    5 Comments

    It was summer in the midst of drought. The earth was parched, impenetrably hard, and all about leaves fell like rain, clogging gutters and the drains. Leaves fell in clouds, curled and dry, and formed a carpet across the street that crunched beneath pedestrians’ feet.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    COVID-19 doesn't discriminate, nor should we

    • Carolina Gottardo
    • 06 April 2020
    6 Comments

    The ability to work from home or social distance is a class issue. How do you practice social distancing in the slums of Lagos, the favelas of Rio or the shanty towns of Bogota, the city where I was born? Here in Australia, it’s not much different for refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants in vulnerable situations.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Keeping vigil

    • Julie Perrin
    • 06 April 2020
    4 Comments

    While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.

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