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While the federal government has set a zero net emissions target by 2050, along with the states and territories and local councils in some areas, the steps that are taken to get there are vitally important. Yet there seems to be no signs of a rapid move away from fossil fuels.
To think of life after COVID-19 is daunting. The changes that it has brought to our daily lives have been vertiginous. Our awareness of its potential harm is still limited. We are only beginning to catch sight of the grim beast that slouches towards us threatening death and devastation in coming months.
As the bushfires raged and air quality worsened, we were constantly told to stay indoors, keep cool and be alert for emergency orders on our phones. But with each public service announcement, we continued to leave some of our most vulnerable behind.
The great significance of the change may lie in its confirmation that the churches no longer have the central place in Australian society they once enjoyed. This is now being reflected in public ceremonial. The public sphere is now more thoroughly secular and loosed from the moorings of its historical traditions.
Australia Day would be wasted if it were devoted simply to self-congratulation. In the wake of the catastrophic fires we need to ask questions about how Indigenous Australians before settlement managed the land and how our agricultural and economic practices have contributed to the perilous situation in which we now find ourselves.
As the sea withdrew, the waves left curling black lines that crossed one another. The beach became a map in which territories were separated from one another. That image reflected the fires and the ways in which they were perceived. They were more than localised events. They affected relationships that spread far beyond the fire.
To nominate Greta Thunberg the most significant person of 2019 is not to canonise her, still less to say that her way of pressing for action to address climate change is the only way. But her intransigence and single-minded focus are needed to mobilise the support necessary to make politicians act responsibly.
The fact that they so easily turned their attention away from the lives of the people threatened by fire to brawling about their own virtues and lack of them offers little hope that the lives of Australians will count with them when they reflect on the causes and the proper response to the fires.
If we wish to persuade the public that a group of people is being treated unjustly, we portray them as innocent victims. We represent them as a class and as virtuous in order to change public opinion. Stories of violent behaviour by members of the group, however, reveal the reality that no group is uniformly composed of the virtuous and innocent.
Reflection on the demonstration and the criticisms made of it prompts a more radical and subversive question. Who actually were the adults here? When assessed by conventional wisdom about the path from childhood to adulthood, it might seem that supposed adults were behaving like children and children like adults.
Pope Francis has insisted that the urgent need to care for the natural world of which we are part is not a disputed question but a Christian duty. He has appealed to the legacy of St Francis of Assisi, whose name he took when he became Pope; that saint of the 13th century who is popularly known best for his love of nature.
In Boochani's experience, Australians were homogenous and unreflective parts of a machine designed to dehumanise, cow and corrupt the people who sought protection. This report and the departmental response suggest that in on-shore detention the human destruction is not directly intended. It is seen simply as irrelevant.
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