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Keywords: Boat People

  • ENVIRONMENT

    The reef doctor

    • Michele Gierck
    • 31 August 2024

    As rising sea temperatures trigger widespread coral bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef, marine scientists explore the devastating effects and do what they can to restore these vital ecosystems. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Seeking refuge, finding red tape

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 05 July 2024

    There is no doubt that laws for determining refugee status and onshore protection are complex. The cases of NZYQ and ASF17 demonstrate that when laws regarding asylum and protection intersect with laws regarding character and protection of the community, the results can be extremely messy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Justice and Hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 June 2024

    Raimond Gaita insists that there is something precious in each human being. He does not rest this conviction on a particular religious or philosophical grounding. It flows, rather, from a rich reading of human possibilities and questioning of the meaning of life.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On the anniversary of a poet's birth, a universal message to nations

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 20 February 2024
    1 Comment

    ‘The loss of memory by a nation is also a loss of its conscience.’ As the loss of conscience grows with each succeeding generation, one day righting the boat on the sea of forgetfulness will become impossible. In the end, what people don’t know, they won’t miss. 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Some like it hot

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 July 2023
    6 Comments

    With Southern Europe's relentless heatwave leading to ensuing wildfires and loss of life, what is the future of this region under such environmental duress? And how can individuals and communities respond to the urgent and pervasive threat of climate change?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Back to Bilo for a Tamil family

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 02 June 2022
    7 Comments

    The case of the Murugappan family illustrates the punitive and puritanical approach of the previous government towards human beings arriving in Australia by boat and then seeking asylum. The tone of each message clearly reflects totally different attitudes towards the people affected, with special note of the fact that Minister Chalmers rang the family to tell them, and then rang people in Biloela to pass on the news.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Our moral duty towards Afghan refugees

    • Vincent Long Van Nguyen
    • 30 August 2021
    9 Comments

    I was one of the boat people who escaped from South Vietnam. The escape happened after South Vietnam had fallen to the Vietnamese communist forces in 1975, and my world descended into total chaos with an international embargo, wars against China and Cambodia, forced collectivisation and the insidious spread of what were termed “re-education camps” - but were really communist gulags. My siblings and I grew up in a world of poverty, isolation, oppression and constant fear of what might happen to us or our loved ones.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remember there are sixty million

    • Geoff Page
    • 29 January 2018
    3 Comments

    There must be something in between those world-wide 60 million urgers bobbing in their boats ... Nailing up our own 400, give or take a few, to crosses cut from tropic palms via chainsaws made in China, intending that the westward waft from all the dried and dying will stop those wallowers in Java from putting out to sea ...

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  • AUSTRALIA

    We are links in the chain of asylum seeker cruelty

    • Rod Grant
    • 18 November 2016
    18 Comments

    Having a sense of something as right or wrong, good or bad, is the essence of humanity. We get it from home, from education, religion, friends, the media. It's the sniff test or the pub test or the gut feeling or the Bible or Quran or Torah. We all have it. And just as people have a sense of right and wrong, we also have a very good humbug detector, and it's clanging loudly when politicians unctuously claim all their 'stop the boats' strategies are driven by desire to prevent drownings at sea.

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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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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The boat people from paradise lost

    • Lyn Bender
    • 23 April 2016
    7 Comments

    Ursula Rakova told how the sea that had been the friend of her people, was turning against them. It had crashed through and divided her island in two. Coconut palms were collapsing at the new shoreline. Food gardens were lost, as the soil was increasingly rendered infertile by salty tides that washed over them. The land that had been handed from grandmother to daughter, would bequeath no legacy to the granddaughters. The homeland of generations was disappearing before their eyes.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Friendlier Ghosts of Australia Days Future

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 January 2016
    4 Comments

    The two major challenges facing the world have to do with kindness to strangers and care for the natural world. If the image of the beginnings of Australia is of a boatload of powerful Europeans coming to exploit the land occupied by a primitive people, a better image of future Australia Days might be of Australia sending parties to Indigenous settlements and other nations to discover how to cooperate in the great projects of reconciliation between people and people with nature.

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