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Keywords: Blame

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Blame detention centres, not detainees

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 March 2011
    37 Comments

    Those who defend the humanity of asylum seekers are often dismissed as bleeding hearts. It is tempting to respond by referring to those who defend the existing regime of detention as bleeding minds. The recent events in remote detention centres are deplorable, but predictable.

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  • RELIGION

    Japan's gods of nature

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 21 March 2011
    5 Comments

    In Japan's relief centres and obliterated streets, there is no news of looting or violence, no shouts of blame, no demands for immediate evacuation and coronial inquests. 'Shinto is a nature religion,' says my guide Yoshiko. 'We give thanks to everything we have.'

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  • RELIGION

    Stories of rebuilding after the floods

    • 20 January 2011
    9 Comments

    When the media focus on expressions of anger and try to identify people to blame, they encourage people to remain paralysed by grief and to break connections precisely at the time when they need to be strengthened.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: The crucifixion of Christine Nixon

    • Moira Rayner
    • 05 January 2011
    15 Comments

    No firestorm of blame would be raging in the media were Christine Nixon not a woman, a decent and strong woman, a prominent woman and an ethically sound woman of an age and with the experience to possess a raging integrity of her own and, by her very being, to offer ruthless men a soft target.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    We're to blame for election shocker

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 August 2010
    20 Comments

    We are wrong to assume our involvement in the political process ends with the casting of votes. If the experience of a fetid election campaign, of leadership abdicated and of a hung parliament leads us to offer more modest local forms of participation and leadership, all Australians will gain.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bushfire blame misses the point

    • Paul Collins
    • 04 August 2010
    16 Comments

    Sadly the Commission played the blame game. This happens after every major fire and originates in the need to find scapegoats. Neither Christine Nixon nor the others who copped the blame could have known they were dealing with a whole new era of firestorm.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Black Saturday gibe mars Murray's might

    • Philip Harvey
    • 16 April 2010
    6 Comments

    In one poem Les Murray would reduce the causes of the Black Saturday fires to differences in forest management between 'hippies' and 'rednecks'. Utilising poetry to play the blame game demeans our understanding of the complexity of that disaster.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The crucifixion of Christine Nixon

    • Moira Rayner
    • 09 April 2010
    79 Comments

    No firestorm of blame would be raging in the media were Christine Nixon not a woman, a decent and strong woman, a prominent woman and an ethically sound woman of an age and with the experience to possess a raging integrity of her own and, by her very being, to offer ruthless men a soft target.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Scapegoating ministers

    • John Warhurst
    • 02 March 2010
    12 Comments

    We are often quick to blame government ministers. In the case of Bill Shorten, Stephen Conroy and Peter Garrett, they may emerge with tarnished reputations. But in rushing to criticise our ministers we often let ourselves off the hook too easily.

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  • MEDIA

    Catholic dogs and the new sectarianism

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 08 October 2009
    13 Comments

    Marrying Out recalls the vicious sectarian divide between Catholics and Protestants in Australia during much of the 20th century. Blame is allocated to neither Protestants nor Catholics, but to the human propensity for distrust and hatred.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Flame blame is a shame

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 August 2009
    11 Comments

    The Black Saturday bushfires had the same relationship to previous fires as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima did to other bombing raids. Defects of communication and organisation, while regrettable and costly, were irrelevant: there's no assured safety for those who live near bushland.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Politics stymie bushfire response

    • Paul Collins
    • 13 February 2009
    12 Comments

    Though the fires are still burning, the blaming has already begun, with environmentalists and academics pitted against rural people and firefighters. We have entered a new era of fires and will need to take a long, ecologically sensitive look at what has happend.

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