Keywords: Social Services
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AUSTRALIA
As Australia heads toward a federal election, the government’s latest budget offers relief but fails the deeper test of justice. In a nation facing rising inequality and entrenched disadvantage, what’s missing is a vision anchored in the common good, a politics that serves not just voters, but the voiceless.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 02 April 2025
Countering a rise in youth crime with tough new bail laws will ensure community safety, but risks compounding the very crisis they aim to solve. As more children are placed in detention, the changes raise urgent questions about justice, policy failure, and the long-term social cost of prioritising punishment over prevention.
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RELIGION
- Vincent Long Van Nguyen
- 01 April 2025
As war rages, the climate suffers and inequality grows, the ancient idea of Jubilee feels newly urgent. Can an economy built on profit give way to one rooted in justice? Can the Church trade power for presence? Renewal may begin where the poor, the displaced and the earth come together.
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AUSTRALIA
- David Hayward
- 28 March 2025
Covid offered a rare chance to reimagine the role of the state. What might have become a pivot to care and collective responsibility became a bonanza for entrenched interests. The crisis passed. Inequality returned. And the deeper reckoning that beckoned was quietly deferred, perhaps indefinitely.
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AUSTRALIA
When Cyclone Alfred swept through Queensland, the damage was swift, but its most enduring effects are harder to see. As the clean-up began, a quieter crisis emerged: disrupted care, rising health risks, and a fragile health system ill-equipped to cope.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 25 March 2025
As Australia approaches another federal election, the Catholic Church, long ambivalent about democratic politics, prepares to weigh in. Its official statement could play it safe, as in years past — or it could offer a deeper moral vision, confronting the global drift toward division with the quiet radicalism of synodality.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 24 March 2025
With America's reliability in question, Australia is rethinking what security really means. Should it double down on military self-reliance, or reconsider the cost of placing defence above all else? As alliances fray and power shifts, the country faces a deeper reckoning: whom can it trust—and at what price?
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AUSTRALIA
- Barry Gittins
- 13 March 2025
Australia’s political class might make grand promises, but for those on the margins — homeless, underemployed, struggling with addiction — these pledges mean little. The people who have been left behind know the game is rigged. As elections approach, they watch from the outside, knowing their vote was never meant to count.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 March 2025
What feels like turbulence in the present often reveals itself, in hindsight, as the rupture of an era. From the fall of Rome to the upheavals of today, are we witnessing mere disruption, or the twilight of an old order?
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RELIGION
- Jim McDermott
- 13 March 2025
Frank Brennan wears his prominence lightly. A priest, lawyer, and tireless advocate for Indigenous rights and refugees, he is as at home in political corridors as he is at the dinner table, welcoming friends with stories and good cheer. Now, celebrating 50 years as a Jesuit, he reflects on faith, justice, and a life of service.
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EDUCATION
- Erica Cervini
- 06 March 2025
Despite public fascination with ancestry, true crime, and historical podcasts surging, formal study of history is in free fall. With university departments shrinking and misinformation rising, historians face an urgent question: how do you persuade students—and the public—that history isn’t just interesting, but essential to understanding the present?
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 05 March 2025
Lent is often reduced to private acts of restraint. But its history tells a richer story; of communal memory, public reckoning, and the need to confront human suffering. As new crises unfold, from war to political decay, Lent reminds us that forgetting the past is a luxury we cannot afford.
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