Keywords: Multiculturalism
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 25 August 2018
25 Comments
Dutton would never have enjoyed any legitimacy as PM given the tactics he employed to get there, and such behaviour would have been repeated and rewarded yet again in the future. Even in the derelict state of Australia's contemporary politics, Dutton's perfidy augmented by Abbott's desire for revenge are no longer to be rewarded.
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AUSTRALIA
- Fatima Measham
- 15 August 2018
20 Comments
Fraser Anning's speech was heavily criticised, though few who did so bear credibility. Turnbull, Dutton and Tudge can hardly be taken seriously when they invoke multiculturalism. This is how racism works: it displaces focus from material problems to imagined threats.
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AUSTRALIA
'Racism seems to make the news a lot,' notes Jacqueline Maley, for a country that according to Queensland LNP senator Ian Macdonald has either no or only isolated racism. The most vicious, blatant racial abuse I have experienced or witnessed has been on public transport. Every abuser has been white. Almost all are men.
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AUSTRALIA
- Sheila Ngoc Pham
- 27 April 2018
4 Comments
As someone who has a language background which will in all likelihood not make it past one more generation in my family here in Australia, I've long understood the way language loss can occur as a result of migration, to say nothing of acts like colonisation. These are great forces that are difficult but, as I've found, not impossible to resist.
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AUSTRALIA
- Sheila Ngoc Pham
- 27 March 2018
7 Comments
On my first day of primary school, I understood very little English and spoke even less. My parents seemed to feel little anxiety and assumed I'd just figure it out at school. Turns out they weren't wrong. However, what they didn't anticipate is what would happen to my Vietnamese.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Tim Beshara
- 20 November 2017
8 Comments
The charge of moral relativism has been laid against progressives in debates about everything from marriage to multiculturalism. However when it comes to climate change and coal, it is conservatives who choose to muddy the debate by pointing out that coal can be good depending on the context in which it is used.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Sean Cowan
- 25 August 2017
8 Comments
It seems like immigration hasn’t been seen in a positive light of late. Control over immigration has been a central theme in the successful Brexit bid in the United Kingdom. America elected a president who suggests tougher laws and screening for immigrants. Syrian refugees were welcomed by the thousands into Canada (46,700 in 2016 alone to be exact) not without considerable controversy.
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RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 29 May 2017
9 Comments
I used to have a t-shirt that read 'this is what a radical Muslim feminist looks like' and I got my fair share of raised eyebrows and challenging questions. The most obvious group that thinks Muslim feminism is oxymoronic are those who we've started to call the 'alt-right'. This group salivates over images of burqa-clad Muslim women scuttling in fear from their bearded oppressors. It is not that they want to free Muslim women so much as it is they don't want the Brown Man ruling.
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AUSTRALIA
I have never felt as uneasy in Australia as I do now. It extends through many areas of my life, from listening to the low level of our national debate about migration and refugees, to my long daily commute and the many high-profile incidents of racist incidents on public transport. The fact that 'micro parties' with overtly racist agendas are influencing major party messages, such as in Labor's recent 'Employ Australians First' advertisement, is concerning because it points to these parties' success.
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AUSTRALIA
- Irfan Yusuf
- 05 April 2017
16 Comments
Hanson doesn't pretend to be religious. Her anti-Islam agenda isn't inspired by some rightwing evangelical passion like Danny Nalliah's nor by a conservative moralistic Catholicism like Cory Bernardi's. But she clearly can feel the pulse of many in the electorate who worry about terrorism and national security. Hanson's politics really only work when there is a 'them' for 'us' to worry about. But where does she get this idea that Islam is not a religion but an ideology?
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AUSTRALIA
- Ann Deslandes
- 20 January 2017
12 Comments
Like all authorised generalisations, this luminous, unified vision of Australia contains truth, exaggerations, and lies. As well as being a globally known story, it's also the story Australia most likes to tell itself; it sings through ideas like the lucky country, the land of the fair go, the land of the long weekend. Social research on Australia tells a more complex story. Australia is in fact an ethnocracy - a state that is formed in the image and for the benefit of a dominant ethnic group.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Irfan Yusuf
- 15 November 2016
8 Comments
Cultural totalitarianism, embodied in Trump in the US and Hanson in Australia, is a major injustice of our age. To fight it effectively, we have to enter into coalitions with those whose opinions we otherwise find distasteful. An anti-racism rally with only leftwing speakers is not going to make as big an impact as one with speakers across the spectrum. To insist the fight against racism is necessarily a leftwing issue is in some ways its own form of cultural bigotry.
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