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Keywords: Breath

  • AUSTRALIA

    Reconsidering the role of ATAR in Australian Schools

    • Sarah Dunn
    • 12 December 2022
    1 Comment

    The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) is a number between 0 and 99.95, which indicates a student’s position in relation to their peers. Statistics from recent years provide troubling insight into the usefulness of the ATAR system, only further exacerbated by the growing number of dissatisfied students.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Good for the economy

    • Justine Toh
    • 24 November 2022
    1 Comment

    When we talk about ‘the economy’, we assume there’s only one worth knowing about: the market economy. That’s why we speak about the economy and GDP in the same breath: we treat the sum of goods and services produced and sold — and the profits we hope they’ll add to the bottom line — as our measure of the health of the nation. Which would be fine if the market economy was the only one that existed. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In praise of words

    • Ann Rennie
    • 28 September 2022
    1 Comment

    We celebrate wordsmiths, minor and major, whose gift it is to write the world for us / To create the nourishing broth, the alphabet soup, of words to work their magic / Words that exhort and advocate / That calm and soothe / Words on which to float away / Words for strength on another day.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The generation of 1926

    • Michael McGirr
    • 12 September 2022
    13 Comments

    My mother often reminded us that she was the same age as the queen. They were both stoic to the point of being difficult to understand. There was never any doubt that, living by their lights, they would spend every breath doing what they felt called to do. Self-indulgence was hardly part of their vocabulary; along with that, they didn’t indulge others much either. The generation of 1926 was made of sturdy timber.   

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    For my grandma

    • William Liu
    • 30 August 2022
    2 Comments

    I was reading / When you left. The news came / Thirteen hours late. So where were you / In that little space of time? Were you breathing softly / In my consciousness? / Should I keep you alive / In morning walks and birdsong, / The smell of braised pork, / And my every achievement?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Race relations

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 June 2022
    10 Comments

    What causes racism? How does it start? Perhaps that’s at the heart of the matter: the difference, and the fear of it. Historically, we have tried to manage the fear via labels and categories: think of the ancient Greeks and their idea that anybody who did not speak Greek was a barbarian because of the bar-bar sounds that they made.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    National wage decision gives low-income earners breathing space but still a long way to go

    • Francis Sullivan
    • 20 June 2022
    1 Comment

    Despite last week’s decision by the Fair Work Commission to push up the national minimum wage by 5.2 percent, millions of Australians, in all parts of the country, will continue to live in poverty and on survival wages. The facts are that the Commission’s decision takes the minimum wage from $772 a week to $812, an increase of $5.70 a day, not a fortune but better than nothing.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Let slip the dogs of war: A tale of futility and bloody-mindedness

    • Dorothy Horsfield
    • 22 March 2022
    8 Comments

    Moscow-based Director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC)Dr Andrei Kortunov warned of its tragic consequences for Russia in an article published four days before the launch of his country’s invasion of Ukraine. The de facto partition of Ukraine, he said, as a result of the Kremlin’s recognition of the independence of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, will signify ‘the final formalisation of the division of Europe’ from which there may be no easy retreat.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kermit and the green-eyed monster

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 February 2022
    17 Comments

    Kermit the Frog, of enduring Muppets and Sesame Street fame, was always a favourite with my children and me: he was so amusing and appealing, and also had a way of unobtrusively communicating simple goodness along with the occasional moral message. He was also concerned with the most important matter of the self, so that in his most famous song he puts a positive spin on the matter of greenness, the colour of envy and jealousy. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The case for basic, public values

    • Greg Craven
    • 25 January 2022
    53 Comments

    One reasonably could ask whether this is the moment to write a book about the potential of Catholic Social Theory to contribute to Australian politics and policy. After all, the Church is still struggling to come to terms with decades of child abuse, hardly a recommendation for social potential. We currently also are attempting to make sense of a Plenary that is both confused and confusing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ownership

    • Jamie Dawe
    • 06 December 2021
    1 Comment

    I own my proclivities and short comings / I own the transgressions of those which have inflicted wounds some unhealed /  I own the sublime moments of subjective joy / I own little but I am rich in compassion / I own not the land it owns me

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  • RELIGION

    Assessing the Plenary: A work in progress

    • Geraldine Doogue
    • 15 November 2021
    61 Comments

    How do I assess our Plenary Council thus far? Or make sense of its related word-of-the-moment, synodality? With apologies to Churchill, dare I hope it is the ‘end of the beginning’? But of what precisely? A priest-friend distilled the challenge rather well last week to me: what would success look like?

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