Author: Andrew Hamilton
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 03 October 2022
In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.
READ MORE 
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 29 September 2022
8 Comments
Recently many people have expressed disquiet about the trend to authoritarian rule throughout the world. They have good reason for doing so. In the world we are entering, the freedom of citizens in the State depends on the will of Governments that will have no enforceable obstacle to withdrawing such freedoms on suspicion of future misconduct and not just for punishment of past, proven misconduct.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 21 September 2022
1 Comment
July marked the tenth anniversary since offshore refugee processing was introduced in Australia, a step that marked a change in Australian policy from an uneasy balance between respect for people in need and the pressure to deter further arrivals. The principle of deterrence is deeply corrupting because it is based on the conviction that it is acceptable to punish one group of people in order to deter others.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 16 September 2022
1 Comment
Joel Birnie’s short and admirable book provokes reflection both on what should have mattered in the relationships between colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century and on what matters in the relationships that constitute Australia today.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 15 September 2022
3 Comments
To say that democracy is under threat is now a truism. And to sustain democracy is a complex task. People need to believe in it and experience its benefits. This demands a deep grounding, founded on our shared human dignity and on our shared responsibility to shape our own lives within the community on which we depend.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 06 September 2022
3 Comments
The policy of the Labor Government can be described as steady as she goes. This does not mean that it will simply follow the policies of the previous government. Its reading is that the ship of state has been becalmed, responding haphazardly to the political winds with no sense of direction or destination. It had become the ship of fools. The new Government then has committed itself to show that there are captain on board and a competent, disciplined crew that can work together.
READ MORE
-
ENVIRONMENT
- Andrew Hamilton
- 01 September 2022
2 Comments
To address climate change demands concerned action that is built on people working together for the good of all. This in turn demands the recognition that the environment is not something different from us but part of us. Our personal good depends on the common good of our world.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 29 August 2022
The subject of this Stray Thought is not sleazy thoughts. It is rather the thought of becoming a lion tamer which might steal upon a person focused from childhood on being a musician with all the sacrifices that this choice has entailed. Or the thought that might lead a soccer goalie to leave his position and go forward to score a winning goal for his team. Naughty thoughts are secret, personal and disruptive. They defy the conventional wisdom we have accepted about career, security and responsibility.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 25 August 2022
11 Comments
In most circles poetry doesn’t matter. It doesn’t put bread on the table, nor raise people to revolt nor even make news unless a grizzled footballer is outed for secretly writing poems. Even in churches poems and hymns are altered to improve their orthodoxy in matters of faith, gender, race or modernity, but rarely their poetic quality.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 August 2022
4 Comments
Few Australians of Irish descent will now be familiar with this history and the experience that accompanied it. They would see themselves as simply Australian. But the emphasis on social justice, the recognition of the value of community, and the concern for people who are marginal that are communicated through Catholic schools and the sympathy with the underdog owe much to the Irish heritage.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 11 August 2022
9 Comments
Much has recently written about the doctrine of discovery and its bearing on the treatment of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the United States where it grounded an early legal decision. The doctrine enshrined in law claims that the discovery of underpopulated and cultivated lands conferred on the discoverers the right to ownership, and was used to justify colonial occupation of territory in the Americas, Asia and Africa.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 August 2022
8 Comments
It is easy to view homelessness from a distance as only a failure of economic policy and of the political responsibility to deliver material goods. A home, however, is more than a house. It connotes connections that are central to humanity. Left without a home people are deprived of more than bricks and mortar; they are diminished in their humanity.
READ MORE