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Keywords: Africa

  • AUSTRALIA

    Can white South African farmers be refugees?

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 05 April 2018
    3 Comments

    Recently the Minister for Home Affairs has confirmed he still wants to provide humanitarian visas to 'persecuted' white South African farmers. Regardless of any political issues, there are a number of legal hurdles these farmers could face in order to meet the strict definition of refugee in Australian law.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Don't be the Australia Dutton wants us to be

    • David Holdcroft
    • 26 March 2018
    8 Comments

    There are two laws for how to get out of a hole: the first is to acknowledge you are in one. The second is to stop digging. I suspect Peter Dutton won't care too much for this advice. He is clearly enjoying his job, playing the populist card with great aplomb, including recently in his advocacy for white South African farmers.

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  • MEDIA

    Media complicit in the rise of political trolls

    • Jonathan Green
    • 02 February 2018
    13 Comments

    Here we have a quick demonstration of a new political method. It's not designed to advance any particular policy position. The point is trolling: the simple art of using rhetoric and political acts to provoke a reaction. Suddenly a lot makes sense. Tony Abbott makes sense. Donald Trump makes sense. So much of social media makes sense.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Attacks on 'lenient' judges harm society

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 January 2018
    12 Comments

    Alarm at supposed youth gangs in Australia is not new. But the current response to claimed Sudanese gangs has a fresh and disturbing aspect: the attack by politicians and their media allies on judges and magistrates for lenient sentences and the granting of bail. Such attacks have harmful consequences.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    African gangs myth shows fear is winning

    • Troy Pittaway
    • 12 January 2018
    20 Comments

    I have been working with Sudanese youth for over eight years and never encountered anything like the gangs of youths that are being talked about. To try and distill an entire culture, with various sub-cultures and values, into a media soundbite about hordes of African gangs, insults not only the Sudanese community, but every Australian.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Voting yes to black and gay rights

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 06 October 2017
    3 Comments

    One of the first votes I ever cast was the one in which I got to help decide whether a marginalised group of people should have the same rights as me. It was March 1992. I was a young, white, enfranchised South African working as a journalist. The referendum was one of the methodical steps taken by F. W. de Klerk in the dismantling of apartheid.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The beloved countries are still crying

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 August 2017
    9 Comments

    Seventy years ago Alan Paton wrote Cry the Beloved Country. His novel opened many Australians’ eyes to the wounded South Africa that lay behind its colonial surface. His elegiac conclusion was prescient of the two generations that followed.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate revolutionaries of East Africa

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 11 July 2017
    3 Comments

    The world's poor are bearing the brunt of global warming yet they have done the least to cause it. African countries have some of the lowest carbon emissions rates in the world, but their fields are drying up and their pastureland is vanishing. Still, all is not lost. If we want to find the answers to climate change, many of them exist within the communities already being impacted. These people understand the urgent threat posed by global warming and they are banding together to find solutions.

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  • RELIGION

    Reconciliation and mission

    • Frank Brennan
    • 15 May 2017

    The reconciliation of this vertical relationship is possible only through the mediation of Jesus who embodies, lives and dies the reality of this reconciliation. He puts us right with our God and thereby establishes the basis for right relationship with each other. In many countries such as Australia, Timor Leste and South Africa, the public rhetoric and programs for reconciliation have, at least in part, been informed and underpinned by this theological perspective.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Putting a face to the effects of Australia's aid freeze

    • David Holdcroft
    • 12 May 2017
    4 Comments

    Alain is one of around 11,000 people living in this particular camp in the south of Zimbabwe. It seems an unlikely location to talk of the freeze on funding for Australian foreign aid announced in the budget, but it is in places like these, unseen and therefore unknown by the Australian population, that the effects are often felt. Alain is lucky: the camp where he lives has good education. Worldwide however, only 50 per cent of children in forced migrant situations will attend primary school, 22 per cent secondary and a paltry 1 per cent any institution of higher learning.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The relevance of remembrance in the 21st century

    • Kate Mani
    • 21 April 2017
    7 Comments

    Ypres' human collateral damage and displacement of those forced to flee is investigated at Ypres' In Flanders Fields Museum. The museum handbook parallels Belgian's WWI refugee exodus with the plight of refugees today fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and Africa. It's one way In Flanders Fields Museum is adopting a forward-looking approach to commemoration, pulling World War I's messages and themes out of 1918 and propelling them into the 21st century.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Keeping race hate at bay in South Africa

    • Munyaradzi Makoni
    • 28 March 2017
    1 Comment

    Life is back to normal a month after residents of Mamelodi in South Africa marched from on the Home Affairs offices in protest over criminality among immigrants. Now, there are calls for closer re-examination of the action, which many see as threatening peace in one of Africa's biggest economies. 'If drugs and crime were really the issues, it should have been billed as an anti-drugs, anti-crime march, not an anti-foreigner march,' said Johan Viljoen of Jesuit Refugee Service.

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