Keywords: National Security
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AUSTRALIA
The new ASIO Powers Amendment Bill 2020 is being rushed through Parliament in a time of pandemic, guaranteeing that it will lack even the minimal level of scrutiny normally accorded to legislation dealing with ‘national security’.
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MEDIA
- Binoy Kampmark
- 07 June 2019
9 Comments
The gradual additions to Australia's national security framework, in the absence of an entrenched constitutional right protecting the press, has made the conditions ripe for such raids. As Andrew Wilkie warns, such matters begin incrementally: a law here, a raid there, then 'one day you wake up and we look like East Germany'.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 06 August 2018
How are we to honour the commitment to peace of these Japanese and Maralinga survivors of nuclear conflagrations unleashed maliciously or negligently last century? We need to renew our commitment to painstaking negotiation of international treaties and agreements designed to ensure peace and security for all, insisting on the dignity and human rights of all.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Justin Glyn
- 06 October 2017
7 Comments
In this time of austerity I am pleased and proud that Our Glorious Leader has decided to curtail the luxuries which we had formerly enjoyed ... for our own good, of course. I refer, of course, to our rapidly diminishing pool of civil liberties.
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PODCAST
Is there a way to think about terrorism without politics? Do counter-terrorism responses make us safer? What are sensible ways to sift through news reports about acts of terror? Andrew Zammit takes us through these and other questions. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and has worked on terrorism-related research projects at Monash University and Victoria University.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 21 April 2017
4 Comments
At Anzac Day it is common to set the deaths of soldiers into the context of a larger cause; as shaping a template of national identity. This year we celebrate it in a sea of citizen deaths from terrorism and military actions. Such killings are also often set within a broader context such as democracy, national security, or the Western way of life. Deeper reflection suggests that to attribute meaning and value to people through their relationship to a cause does not enhance but diminishes their humanity.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Binoy Kampmark
- 10 April 2017
5 Comments
Absent a Security Council resolution, the US had operated independently, adopting a policing and punitive stance against the Assad regime. 'This action,' House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted, 'was appropriate and just.' If humanitarian intervention is supposedly engineered to punish a regime in breach of obligations to protect the civilian population, it starts looking, all too often, like an act of regime change. At what point is the distinction on such matters as proportion or necessity even credible?
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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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INTERNATIONAL
- Fatima Measham
- 01 August 2016
6 Comments
The United Nations Security Council is in the process of selecting its next secretary-general. There is intense interest, not least because the General Assembly has made efforts to make it more transparent via an open nomination process and televised debates. The UN is seen in some parts as an edifice to bureaucratic ineptitude. But the internationalism that stitched the world back together after two calamitous wars has frayed. We need the UN as ballast against future instability.
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AUSTRALIA
It has puzzled me that the constitutional implications of the AFP's raid on the offices of the official opposition and one of its senators two weeks ago has not been explored in more detail. The uncomfortable fact is that the leaks about which NBN Co is complaining are not damaging because they relate to competition nor to national security, but because they expose cost overruns and reflect badly on the government of the day - the same government which holds all the shares in NBN Co.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 25 January 2016
22 Comments
Hailing from Argentina, Francis puts his trust neither in ideological Communism nor in unbridled capitalism. We need to enhance international security, building the rule of law within multilateral organisations, and fostering the climate for investment sensitive to the triple bottom line - economic, social and environmental. I return from Rome grateful that we have a pope prepared to open these questions, accompanied by senior prelates happy to mix it with business and community leaders.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 December 2015
19 Comments
The pastel coloured domesticity of the images of Jesus' birth does not do justice to its context. Herod's sending out first his spies to find where the Messiah was to be born, and then his soldiers to eradicate the threat the child posed to national security, may not appear on Christmas cards, but they frame the story of Jesus' birth. The disjunction between the tenderness of the Christmas stories and the brutality of their public context is mirrored in the conflict between the humane values of the Gospel and the harsh instrumental values of the public world in any age.
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