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Keywords: Commons

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Abbott's foreign policy flops

    • Tony Kevin
    • 12 September 2014
    11 Comments

    Since Richard Casey was External Affairs Minister in the 1950s, the three pillars of Australian foreign policy have been: a genuine reaching out to our Asian neighbours, adherence to UN-based multilateral values and institutions, and a firm but self-respecting defence partnership with the United States. All those pillars look pretty shaken now.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Telling good Kurds from bad

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 September 2014
    4 Comments

    A debate about arming, and reinforcing the Kurds, is not an open and shut case. European powers and the United States draw the false distinction that there are good Islamic militants and bad ones, with the bad ones supposedly against the Western military program. The game of backing and supporting misunderstood – and dangerous – groups persists.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Breaking the till

    • Isabella Fels
    • 05 September 2014
    5 Comments

    As I go down Chapel Street, I feel like I am running a million miles an hour trying to look a million dollars. In the past my mother and my father have had to intervene to stop me letting loose. They have both rescued me from keeping totally unsuitable clothes by showing a letter to the shops by my psychiatrist, stating that I have an 'obsessional preoccupation' with spending money and please can the items be refunded.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Making Indigenous Literacy Day obsolete

    • Luke Pearson
    • 03 September 2014
    13 Comments

    As a former primary teacher, I have seen the importance of literacy programs for our young people, and the joy and power that comes from learning to read, especially for older students who thought they would never get to read. If schools were given adequate support, resourcing, staffing and training to better cater for the needs and interests of Indigenous students and families, there would hardly be any need to mark Indigenous Literacy Day.  

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  • MARGARET DOOLEY AWARD

    Our future is public

    • Andy Lynch
    • 27 August 2014
    9 Comments

    The kind of Australia we live in today can be directly attributed to the kinds of institutions built 150 years ago - schools, universities, libraries, museums, and more. But in 2014 is it even possible to carve out new public institutions or give new life to those that have waned in relevance?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Car park hunger

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 26 August 2014
    1 Comment

    A topless man shuffles into Coles. The Big Issue seller is liked and avoided. Buskers who specialize with the night, streetlights mooning the spaces that never close.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    An elusive peace in Ukraine

    • Tony Kevin
    • 26 August 2014
    6 Comments

    My optimism in previous essays on Ukraine continues to be undermined by the remarkable capacity of all players in this tragic drama – the government in Kiev, the rebels in East Ukraine, and their respective backers in NATO and Moscow – to dig in stubbornly and refuse to compromise goals in this now very nasty civil war.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Order is not justice in Ferguson

    • Fatima Measham
    • 22 August 2014
    7 Comments

    The lack of restraint on Wilson's part, the indignity that shrouded Brown's body long after his death, the disproportionate force deployed against protestors and journalists in the aftermath – this has become the canvas upon which the long grievance of racialised oppression has found vivid expression.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Best of 2013: Margaret Thatcher versus the Scots

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 10 January 2014

    While any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind', I must admit to pouring a glass of good malt at the news of Thatcher's passing. The Southern English may laud her as the greatest prime minister after Churchill but for us Scots she was a hate figure who in the last days of her premiership scarcely dared to cross the border for fear of being assassinated.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Christmas story's whisper from the edges

    • John Falzon
    • 17 December 2013
    13 Comments

    Recently Pope Francis blasted the so-called trickle-down economic theories in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Some will scorn his message as naive at best and dangerous at worst, while others will regard it as an urgent enkindling of hope in the face of degradation and despair. The Christmas story hints that another kind of world is possible.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Labor's performance enhancing drug

    • Michael Mullins
    • 29 July 2013
    14 Comments

    Australian cycling great Stuart O'Grady says using drugs was the only way he could be competitive at the 1998 Tour de France. Graham Richardson — famed for his 'whatever it takes' approach to politics — says Labor's PNG solution is cruel but 'politically brilliant' and has given the party a competitive edge. In years to come, Labor party elders will realise the cost of this competitiveness.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Margaret Thatcher versus the Scots

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 10 April 2013
    72 Comments

    While any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind', I must admit to pouring a glass of good malt at the news of Thatcher's passing. The Southern English may laud her as the greatest prime minister after Churchill but for us Scots she was a hate figure who in the last days of her premiership scarcely dared to cross the border for fear of being assassinated.

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