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Author: Binoy Kampmark

  • EDUCATION

    Research funding regime gets personal

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 01 November 2018
    2 Comments

    Birmingham's intervention, and Tehan's consolidation of that ill-exercised discretion, suggests Australian Research Council funding will be politicised by executive veto. Expertise will be subordinated to the whimsy of the education minister of the day; researchers will be pondering how to shape their applications accordingly.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Fronts of distortion in the Khashoggi affair

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 19 October 2018
    4 Comments

    Trump finds facts distasteful and prefers to avoid engaging them; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia finds them in need of censorship, possibly of the most extreme type; and Turkey, with one of the world's most sullied records in treating journalists, retains a reserve discordant with its own findings.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Lehman Brothers and the next GFC

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 13 September 2018
    2 Comments

    It has been a decade since the banking aristocracy Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in what would be the chant of doom that became the Global Financial Crisis. Today, the legacy of Lehman Brothers and the crisis it helped precipitate supply warnings of the next shock.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    No substance to Trump-Putin show

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 18 July 2018
    4 Comments

    Such gatherings only serve to feed the display of power and displace reality. In truth (dangerous word to use these days), the gathering was treated with an unwarranted seriousness that gave it a credence it never deserved.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The global push against refugees

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 12 July 2018
    16 Comments

    Cometh the time, cometh the exploitable prejudice. With millions of globally displaced persons, states are retreating from the business of actually treating the condition as one of dysfunction inflicted by war, famine and poverty. It has morphed from a matter of humanitarianism to one of social ill and unease.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trump's Syria pantomime

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 16 April 2018
    4 Comments

    If anything, there seemed to be something hollow about a gesture that all but acknowledges the success of the Russian-backed regime which has taken a stranglehold over the civil war. One conclusion is that brutality is fine as long as it avoids the use of certain types of force, namely chemical weapons.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stephen Hawking as saint and celebrity

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 15 March 2018
    22 Comments

    The rush to pay tribute to the cosmological colossus had an air of reflex about it. People paid respects, but many were not entirely sure why. He'd be missed, but in what way? Such is the way of celebrity, even those rare intellectual ones who burst the barrier of mass marketing. They become symbols in their time, ciphers of an age.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Buying exemptions: Donald Trump's tariff deal

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 13 March 2018
    5 Comments

    This affair has done little to encourage Australians keen on pushing a more robustly independent line from Washington. A ceremonial subservience and deference to US power has been exhibited. Such sentiments embrace the inherent inequality of the Australian-US relationship. To be in deficit to the US is seen as a good and necessary thing.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Florida shooting and the cult of individuality

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 16 February 2018
    6 Comments

    The mass murderous gun, even in the hands of a disgruntled teenager, remains a manifestation that will linger in the face of legislative apathy and constitutional fervour. A civilised society may not require such guns, but US civilisation expresses a frontier brutality that refuses to abandon them.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Crossing the lines of judgment

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 30 January 2018
    14 Comments

    The reaction of Judge Aquilina might well be understood as the most natural reaction to scale and proportion. But precisely because she maintains to be an agent of the law, torpedoing Nassar's case at the sentencing phase has compromised her very own statement of defence in favour of his victims.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Undermining NZ: Dutton's refugee ploy

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 20 November 2017
    9 Comments

    These sprinklings of poison through the press, with occasional mentions in New Zealand, serve two purposes: to show Australian refugee policy as sound, and offshore detention and resettlement in an unsuitable third country as appropriate; and to deflect attention from the discharge of obligations under the UN Refugee Convention.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    No end to the cruelty as Manus centre closes

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 31 October 2017
    16 Comments

    The closure of the centre is not the end of it. The men are to be moved to purpose-built accommodation in the town of Lorengau. There is both fear and reluctance. The cruelty, in other words, is merely being displaced.

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