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Keywords: 000

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Artists paint the truth of SA nuclear la la land

    • Michele Madigan
    • 13 February 2017
    9 Comments

    'It will be your artists: the poets, painters, actors, dancers, musicians, orators - they will be the ones to lead the changes.' It was one of the many international invited guests, a Maori woman speaker, who made this prediction to the huge 40,000 strong crowd that marched to Hyde Park, Sydney, on 26 January 1988. In South Australia almost 30 years later, this prophecy continues to unfold in the high-stakes battle for country that surrounds the proposed nuclear waste dump.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Punitive truth behind Dutton's 'sham marriage' furphy

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 11 November 2016
    14 Comments

    'We're not going to allow people who have sought to come by boat to come to Australia through a backdoor and we are not going to allow sham marriages to facilitate that,' said Peter Dutton. Given all the existing checks and hurdles, why have a ban? It would only affect about 2000 people; the other 35,000 who came by boat before 19 July 2013 or were not sent to Nauru and Manus Island are not affected. The true intention is to further punish the people we dumped on our Pacific neighbours.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Innovating for a jobless society

    • Rick Measham
    • 07 November 2016
    28 Comments

    Growing up in Geelong, many friends worked at Ford, or Alcoa, Pilkington or any of the other allied suppliers. As each of these stopped manufacturing in Victoria's second city, employers and governments promised retraining. But where are the jobs? Factories are quickly moving to a 'lights out' operation, with no lights, no air conditioning — and no humans. Modelling suggests nearly 5000 Geelong residents will lose their jobs to the decline in manufacturing before the end of 2017, and 200,000 nationwide. Can we find new-economy jobs for every one of them?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Western Bulldogs' example for the common good

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 October 2016
    5 Comments

    The best writers on sport show that it is a metaphor for life. Perhaps that is why the triumph of the Western Bulldogs in the AFL Grand Final has been so ruthlessly milked for larger significance. But I would like to exploit it once more for the way in which it illustrates the weakness of a liberal politics that assumes that all will benefit from the economic growth that unfettered competition between individuals yields. The joy of the Western Bulldogs victory lay in its challenge to these assumptions.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Responsibility for royal commissions' effectiveness lies with us

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 11 October 2016
    2 Comments

    'Finally!' we might think, regarding the commencement of the royal commission after the mainstream revelation of the abuses at Don Dale and other juvenile detention centres. But is this just another deferral to a disinterested power? What can we hope will come of moves like this from leaders whose own legitimacy feels so craven and thin? I suspect not much. There are already claims the royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the NT is on shaky ground.

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  • CARTOON

    The hole truth

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 11 October 2016
    1 Comment

    This week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

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  • ECONOMICS

    It will take more than a royal commission to tame the banks

    • David James
    • 10 October 2016
    2 Comments

    The strategy of the Big Four banks' appearance in parliament was clear enough. Blame the whole thing on a need to improve impersonal 'processes', imply that there have been a few bad apples but overall things are fine, and promise to do better in the future. The greatest challenge was probably to hide the smirks. A royal commission is being held up as an alternative, and no doubt it would be more effective. But a royal commission would not address the main issue.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Peace in Colombia heads into extra time

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 10 October 2016
    2 Comments

    Colombia has been on a massive political and emotional roller coaster. A peace accord to end the 52 years civil war was signed on 26 September, only to be rejected in a referendum on 2 October. A few days later President Juan Manuel Santos, whose referendum was rejected, received the 2016 Nobel Peace. All of this happened not in a hundred years, but in the space of a few weeks. Yet for those who know a bit about Latin American politics the defeat of Santos in the referendum was not unexpected.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My last poem

    • Max Richards
    • 10 October 2016
    9 Comments

    'You'd be on the beach with me, dearest, and your favourite birds nearby as if making gifts of themselves to you. Sharing was what we were doing, and there seemed no end to it, though there would be, darkness coming on, no knowing when but not yet, not quite yet.' Poetry by Max Richards, who died after sustaining head injuries in a car accident in Seattle on 21 September.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope, not nihilism, is the antidote to bleak times

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 September 2016
    3 Comments

    In Mexico, a 12-year old boy walked onto the road to stare down an 11,000-strong anti-LGBTQ protest. In Italy, a small town has been revived by the arrival of refugees and migrants. In the US, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has pulled the issue of police brutality into apolitical spaces, using symbolic gestures to draw out the history of racialised oppression. As Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine puts it, 'If you want to be right, be a pessimist, if you want to do right, be an optimist.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Nauru Files reinforce the need for political grace

    • Fatima Measham
    • 11 August 2016
    11 Comments

    The Guardian has released incident reports that lay bare the details of life on Nauru for people detained under our immigration regime. It is an 8000-page indictment of the ethical and moral character of this country. We've been here before. We already know that the torment of children does not move the political class, nor do the indignities meted out to women. Men have died under circumstances that flow from decisions nominally made on our behalf. What would it take to break the impasse?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Corruption and calamity in Rio's Games of exclusion

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 08 August 2016
    4 Comments

    The Rio 2016 Olympics has earned a well-deserved label: the jogos da excludad, the games of exclusion. It is a label that shames a ruling class that got its priorities wrong. In the name of the Games, 77,000 residents of Rio's favelas have been evicted and hundreds of these settlements have been bulldozed. Those favelas that avoided the bulldozers have been hidden behind concrete walls that epitomise what theologian Leonardo Boff has called the 'lack of shame' living deep in the Brazilian soul.

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