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Keywords: Third Way

  • AUSTRALIA

    There's room at the table for the poor if we make it

    • Julie Edwards
    • 17 October 2016
    17 Comments

    One of the most misused passages of Christian scripture tells us we shall always have the poor with us. It is often repeated by those who are not poor in order to dismiss any project that involves public expenditure or private generosity to people who are poor. When we do not focus on the good or bad conscience of the observer but on the lives of the people who are poor, we can see that the statement is not a justification for a modern society that allows people to live in poverty. It is an indictment.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Inquiry into data use asks the wrong questions

    • Kate Galloway
    • 06 October 2016
    3 Comments

    The Productivity Commission was charged in March to inquire into 'data availability and use'. The inquiry holds important implications for Australians because our personal information is collected and stored by business and government in nearly all our daily interactions. The inquiry's terms of reference however make a number of assumptions, making it look very much as though it will find that the benefits of making data available outweigh the costs. And those costs are likely to be our privacy.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The bad business of privatisation

    • David James
    • 13 September 2016
    18 Comments

    The argument that putting government operations into private hands ensures that things will run better and society will benefit is not merely a stretch; it is in many respects patently false. The argument is based on the claim that the market always produces superior price signals. Yet one area where private enterprise definitely fails is long term stability. If there is an expectation that a privatised service should last in the long term, and usually there is, then selling it to business is a bad choice.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Prisoners of their own stories

    • Brian Matthews
    • 25 July 2016
    10 Comments

    Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote If This is a Man to carry out what he saw as the critical task of bearing witness, and he became one of the greatest writers of the 20th century as he continued to bear witness one way and another in later books. Some day, one of Australia's asylum seekers will, like Levi and with the same sense of dread and horror, tell his or her story to ensure that someone bears witness; and to confirm that all of us are implicated.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Another Coalition budget for the well-off

    • Marcelle Mogg
    • 05 May 2016
    18 Comments

    Even the International Monetary Fund recognises that the best way to grow an economy is to reduce the divide between rich and poor, ensuring that all people have a chance to participate in the social and economic life of a country. The Coalition government remains resolutely opposed to this growing body of evidence, continuing to rely on economic structures that entrench disadvantage, then blame the poor for their fate. The Budget provides tax cuts to the rich and service cuts to the rest.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lazarus at our gate (Easter poems)

    • Bill Rush, Marlene Marburg, Maureen O'Brien, John Cranmer
    • 22 March 2016
    3 Comments

    To be fair, he wasn't a leaner, he was one of the lifters. Helped to keep the country running, so to speak, and speak he did often, on many topics. He was a leader, and felt justified when others, in the region, followed his lead. It wasn't that he didn't see Lazarus, but more that he saw him differently. Break the rules, help one starving beggar and before you know it there will be a flood of them on your door step. That's how he argued and plenty agreed. Judgement day was a long way off.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Labor's negative gearing heroics alone won't save us

    • David James
    • 26 February 2016
    8 Comments

    It is not often that federal political parties exhibit courage. Labor's decision to change the rules on negative gearing is a rare instance. It targets what is most dangerous and unfair in our financial system. Expect howls of protests from powerful lobby groups if it ever looks like becoming policy. But these changes alone won't be enough to deal with the ills of the financial system. While they are designed to target the bias away from productive investment, they won't remove the attraction towards property.

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  • RELIGION

    Pope Francis and the face of mercy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 09 December 2015
    2 Comments

    'I joined the Jesuits in 1975 just as the previous 32nd General Congregation (GC32) was concluding. Pedro Arrupe was at the height of his powers. That Congregation asked the question: 'What is it to be a companion of Jesus today?' and answered unequivocally, 'It is to engage, under the standard of the Cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes.' I have always regarded myself as a GC32 Jesuit. Many of those who gathered for GC33 thought that the GC32 mission was a little too one-dimensional. I suspect Bergoglio was one of those.' Frank Brennan on the eve of the Catholic Church's Jubilee Year of Mercy.

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  • RELIGION

    A third way in the marriage equality debate

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 07 December 2015
    45 Comments

    At the moment, the conversation on marriage equality vs traditional marriage is being driven by extremists on both sides, people who see the struggle as a polarised conflict with the goal of overwhelming victory. But most of us would find that victory unattractive no matter which side is triumphant. Instead, we can choose not to press the button, and to work together to allow both same-sex couples and practising Christians to live their beliefs faithfully, to the fullest of their flourishing.

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  • RELIGION

    The nun who couldn't say no

    • Philomena van Rijswijk
    • 12 August 2015
    12 Comments

    Our family life was fraught with conflict, centred on our parents' inability to cope with my father's serious mental illness. During the early years of her childhood, my sister was made my mother's intimate confidante. This was a time of anguish for Mum, about both her marriage and a series of tragic miscarriages. My sister left home when she was 14, and entered the juniorate on the way to becoming a nun.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Boston bomber sentence shows death penalty is always political

    • Frank Brennan
    • 19 May 2015
    11 Comments

    The lesson from the trials of Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the Bali nine is that the death penalty is always political and macabre. In the US, Justice Scalia was not at all minded to consider the merits of the argument about the effects of the drug Midazolam because he thought the case was all part of a long term political campaign to delegitimise the death penalty. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The spirit of Eureka at Gallipoli

    • Peter Lalor Philp
    • 22 April 2015
    6 Comments

    On the first morning of the Gallipoli landing, the 12th Battalion was fighting its way up the steep slopes from the beach below. Reaching the top of the cliff, the Australians discovered their commanding officer Colonel L.F. Clark was dead. Captain Joseph Peter Lalor – the 31 year old grandson of Peter Lalor of Eureka Stockade fame – then took command, but by noon he was also dead.

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