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Keywords: John Curtin

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Elegy for Peter Porter

    • John Kinsella
    • 05 June 2024

    An elegy doesn’t need to be written straight after a death... and maybe one’s own death catches up before the obituary we write is published. It might be something like re-arranging modernism into structurally sound lines, or discussing the context of metaphors in poems about London and friendship.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Apollo (Metamorphosis)

    • John Kinsella
    • 16 November 2023

    I don’t expect to find the leaves of a plant with your name formed by the veins. No god will have gifted you the future as a flower when flowers are losing their footholds. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lightning Ghosts

    • John Kinsella
    • 25 September 2023
    1 Comment

    I sense them in the air when it’s said there’s little or no chance of a storm — they are apostrophes to themselves, shaped like diacriticals. This is a mundane observation to offer up when the flash closes the light out —that loss of speech to pyrography.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Born to rule and crowned in prison

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 July 2022
    3 Comments

    The leaders of the past are often referred to as a measuring stick for evaluating the present. Australian prime ministers are routinely compared to John Curtin or Robert Menzies. This coming week calls to mind another leader against whom we might measure others. July 18 marks Mandela Day, an annual international day in honour of  Nelson Mandela, the first Black President of South Africa. Mandela had the quality, rare today, of being born to rule.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Best of 2021: Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth

    • John Falzon
    • 04 January 2022
    7 Comments

    When you put rising housing costs alongside stagnating wages, an alarming trend in normalising insecure work, persistent unemployment and underemployment, and statutory incomes that are going backwards in real terms, there’s good reason to be deeply worried about an increase in homelessness.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth

    • John Falzon
    • 10 August 2021
    13 Comments

    When you put rising housing costs alongside stagnating wages, an alarming trend in normalising insecure work, persistent unemployment and underemployment, and statutory incomes that are going backwards in real terms, there’s good reason to be deeply worried about an increase in homelessness.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Looking back to look forward

    • Dustin Halse
    • 30 July 2020
    4 Comments

    In Australia, we have long boasted of our unparalleled prosperity and strong economic growth. We have championed home ownership and the quarter acre block — after all our home is meant to be our castle. But for too many, the basic human right of having a place to call home remains out of reach.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Timor-Leste's bloody sunrise

    • Mark Raper
    • 23 August 2019
    4 Comments

    One man rushed at Dewanto and cut him with a machete. The sister claims that the slaughter then began. Blood flowed out under the doors of the church like a river. Was this what she saw then or what she could not stop seeing in her nightmares? Or both? Over 100 died in Suai that day.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What a good Australia Day might look like

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 January 2019
    19 Comments

    The sound of the didgeridoo would be heard throughout the land. On each street corners buskers would mark out their patch, playing violins, oud, piano accordion, berimbau, nyatiti, cello, mouth organ, zither, anklung or daduk singing the love songs and epic poems from the many civilisations that have enriched Australia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Chasing dignity and work

    • Susan Leong
    • 31 August 2018

    Despite contemporary society's valorisation of the entrepreneurial self, its reality is disempowerment. According to Peter Bieri, 'powerless is the absence of ... the power to be able to fulfill a desire'. What name do we put to a desire so strong it compels one to leave the comforts of home for the untried fields of a new country?

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  • RELIGION

    Live by love and not by fear

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 June 2017
    6 Comments

    These cardinals have a few strong concerns. They think the pope should be setting down clear universal rules that apply to everyone in every situation. Having spent a life time as a pastor in Buenos Aires, Francis knows life is much more complex and messy than that. These four cardinals pine for the papacy of John Paul II. John Paul was a great leader and a great pope for his time. Francis is also a great leader and a great pope for his time, for our time. John Paul and Francis are very different. But then again, the times are very different.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Reimagining work is a project for the unemployed, too

    • Susan Leong
    • 23 June 2017
    4 Comments

    When I wrote recently that the future of work lies in understanding work as 'pleasure in the exercise of our energies', one reader noted 'these discussions have little meaning when you are poor or dispossessed'. Spending your life doing what you are competent at pales into insignificance when set against the prospect of a life engrossed in one's passions. That is a decision that every worker has it within their power to make. And as it turns out, it should be a concern of the unemployed, too.

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