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Keywords: Corruption

  • ECONOMICS

    Australia's deadly game of mates

    • David James
    • 14 August 2018
    6 Comments

    Murray and Frijters detail what they call Australia's 'grey corruption': the grubby nexus between 'James' (corrupt business people) and governments or regulators. The Jameses thrive at the expense of the 'Bruces': ordinary working people. The games of the corrupt elite now cost the 'Bruces' about half their wages.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    History taints Turnbull's fight against corruption

    • Brendan Byrne
    • 01 May 2018
    10 Comments

    While it is a matter of public record the Turnbull government blocked attempts to establish a royal commission into the financial services sector on multiple occasions, the question as to why, especially when it expeditiously facilitated a similar inquiry into corruption within the union movement, is of more than academic interest.

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  • RELIGION

    Aid work grounded in good relationships

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 March 2018
    9 Comments

    The reports of sexual exploitation by officers of aid organisations illustrate the truth of Aristotle's dictum that the corruption of the best is the worst form of corruption. The factors that contribute to such behaviour are complex. They illustrate the constant need for self-reflection personally and in organisations, especially when doing good works.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    It's always Happy Death Day in Canberra now

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 30 October 2017
    6 Comments

    Turnbull's response to the eligibility crisis showcased the mixture of bluster and incompetence that's become characteristic of this government. Like Michaela Cash's attempts to link Shorten with union corruption, his declaration that the court would rule in favour of Joyce saw strategy and common sense give way to short term manoeuvring.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    In praise of local councils

    • Fatima Measham
    • 27 October 2016
    7 Comments

    Unless you have lived elsewhere, where taxes and rates rarely manifest as a tangible and permanent benefit, it is easy to take councils for granted. I grew up in a town where potholes are forever, healthcare is ad hoc and libraries are private. The things that I see my local council do as a matter of routine are wild luxuries in other places around the world. Such competencies arguably measure the health of a democracy - it means that most of the money has not been lost to corruption and fraud.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Corruption and calamity in Rio's Games of exclusion

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 08 August 2016
    4 Comments

    The Rio 2016 Olympics has earned a well-deserved label: the jogos da excludad, the games of exclusion. It is a label that shames a ruling class that got its priorities wrong. In the name of the Games, 77,000 residents of Rio's favelas have been evicted and hundreds of these settlements have been bulldozed. Those favelas that avoided the bulldozers have been hidden behind concrete walls that epitomise what theologian Leonardo Boff has called the 'lack of shame' living deep in the Brazilian soul.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Kicking corruption in church and police 'closed systems'

    • Paul Coghlan
    • 05 May 2016
    10 Comments

    Having worked in closed organisational systems like Victoria Police and various government departments, I have often reflected on how and at what point organisations and their employees become comfortable with the belief that their ideas and attitudes are better informed than those of the general populous - and that their survival is more important. A very stark example of this are the recent court decisions relating to the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989, where 96 people were killed.

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  • RELIGION

    The divisive life of a pacifist priest

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 May 2016
    18 Comments

    By many United States Jesuits including military chaplains, Dan Berrigan was seen as a divisive figure. I also found his actions challenging. I was still to move from my concentration on the goals of military action to focus on what happens to people who make war and have it made on them. Berrigan and others helped me to see the dishonesty in the conduct of the Vietnam war, the cost to Vietnamese civilians and to soldiers on both sides, and the corruption of ethical sensitivity in both societies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Eviction porn has ethical foundations

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 November 2015
    1 Comment

    Against the backdrop of the crash of the US housing market, we linger on the lurid details of families' removal from the brick boxes that have been their homes for decades. We can only watch as they cycle through stages of denial, bargaining, fury and grief. These are well meaning people who have innocently fallen foul of a system that deals in laws and dollars, not humanity. It is a system so corrupt it turns the exploited into exploiters; where its desperate victims embrace corruption in turn as a means of survival.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Should Labor break ties with the unions?

    • John Warhurst
    • 03 August 2015
    15 Comments

    The formal link between trade unions and the Labor Party is sacred in many quarters, and has sustained both sides of the relationship for 120 years. The revelations of the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, despite its anti-Labor political origins, may eventually generate change. But the question has been around for decades, and any move to break the link would be vigorously opposed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Child assassin's slow escape from cult corruption

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 04 June 2015

    The children, their mothers and overseer inhabit a world all their own, morally as well as geographically. They know little but the rustic textures of life inside the compound; where every Friday they paint their faces like jungle animals and sing karaoke as a reward for a good week's killing. Even during their bloody errands, the urban landscape evokes a Martian dereliction. Only Alexander has started to smell danger.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Protestant and Catholic corruption in 1971 Belfast

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 March 2015
    2 Comments

    At the height of the Troubles in Belfast, a young British soldier becomes separated from his unit and spends a night lost in one of the city's most dangerous locales. The city is fractured along numerous lines: it's not merely Catholic versus Protestant; the radicalised youths of the Provisional IRA are at odds with their established forebears. Rarely have the Troubles been so grippingly portrayed.

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