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Author: Fatima Measham

  • EDUCATION

    Students need teachers, not technicians

    • Fatima Measham
    • 10 May 2018
    8 Comments

    For the past several years, education has been treated as solely a technical problem. One of the pitfalls of this is that political will becomes a function of money, which in turn rests on political expedience between federal and state governments, further complicated by external lobbying. Education gets ground to a grain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A parent's guide to pop culture diversity

    • Fatima Measham
    • 26 April 2018
    3 Comments

    The moment in Power Rangers when Cam Watanabe turned into the Green Samurai, I looked at my son's face and could sense what it meant to him. Pop culture validates or marginalises, depending on who is in the frame. Who gets to be seen and heard, and under what circumstances, are political decisions, whether consciously or not.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The radical state of being content

    • Fatima Measham
    • 12 April 2018
    10 Comments

    How comfortable does anyone really need to be? The amounts of money that get quoted in remuneration packages or property portfolios is incomprehensible to many Australians who manage to survive, even thrive, on so much less. Inequality seems to be driven by an incapacity to recognise what is enough and to stop.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Another page torn from the glossary of life

    • Fatima Measham
    • 29 March 2018
    10 Comments

    The last male northern white rhinoceros was euthanased in March. With two females still alive, there is hope the subspecies might be saved. The impending loss of an animal that evolved over six million years, and once grazed in hundreds of thousands, is worth noting. There can be room in our hearts to lament.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Do we really value families?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 March 2018
    3 Comments

    Politicians like to talk family. They talk about their own during campaigns, to establish their credential as human beings. They talk about ours, the 'working families' and 'family values' upon which socio-economies rest. There is even a party called Family First. But let's get real. We wreck families all the time.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stepping out of the way of the next generation

    • Fatima Measham
    • 01 March 2018
    10 Comments

    I've been thinking about my former students lately. Anyone who has ever spent time with young people over the past ten years would see something inevitable in the current moment over gun control in the US, where Parkland students are charging at the seeming edifice of the NRA - and leaving cracks.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Joyce's choices in the capital of hypocrisy

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 February 2018
    33 Comments

    Joyce's extramarital affair is far less salient than the choices allegedly made around it. No politician is owed anything. They are dispensable, and the role is not, which means they have an obligation to preserve the dignity of office and maintain confidence in government. Some things need expelling; it gets toxic, otherwise.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Cabinet Files comedy is Wes Anderson-worthy

    • Fatima Measham
    • 01 February 2018
    14 Comments

    Too few inversions of this power dynamic come along. So we are allowed to laugh a) that some careless handling of furniture can go a long way toward embarrassing people, and b) that those same people have expanded surveillance mechanisms and presided over lapses in data security. It schadens our freude, for sure.

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  • RELIGION

    Francis Sullivan: Reform and renewal after Royal Commission

    • Fatima Measham
    • 24 January 2018
    19 Comments

    Fatima Measham speaks with Francis Sullivan, CEO of the Truth Justice and Healing Council, to reflect on the journey since the Royal Commission was first announced in November 2012 and to consider what are the next steps for the Church.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia Day has never been unifying

    • Fatima Measham
    • 18 January 2018
    32 Comments

    Other states, having been founded on various dates, regarded 26 January as a Sydney thing until 1935. In 1938 it was declared an Aboriginal Day of Mourning. To press the point, the current momentum against Australia Day is not some newfound 'political correctness', not least because it predates the term.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Best of 2017: Getting some perspective on Charlottesville

    • Fatima Measham
    • 11 January 2018

    Instead of refining his initial remarks about a Nazi rally in Charlottesville, which brutally claimed the life of a counter-protester, Donald Trump has doubled down. At a heated news conference in New York, he demanded that journalists define 'alt-right', invoked the idea of an 'alt-left', and lay blame on 'both sides'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Actively bending the moral arc of time

    • Fatima Measham
    • 19 December 2017
    11 Comments

    What we know from resistance to social justice is that the conception of time as a single direction, like an arrow, is favoured by those in power. It does not pierce the realities of those who are historically oppressed. Where the linear past demands reparation, it is something to leave behind, but the powerful revert to it in haste at the prospect of change, saying the line is what it is.

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