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Keywords: Working Class

  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget balancing act fails working poor

    • David Halliday
    • 23 May 2024

    In light of the gains made in lifting people out of poverty during the pandemic, it seems critics are justified in viewing this year’s budget with more than a little disappointment. I wonder, when it comes to the federal budget, who are we trying to serve?

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  • RELIGION

    Theology goes out with the tide

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 November 2023
    10 Comments

    In a recent letter, Pope Francis articulated a controversial vision for an active theology in the Catholic Church, which should be open, outgoing, working at the frontiers of church, rather than self-referential and inward-turning. Naturally, this has raised important questions around the proper place and role of theology.

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  • RELIGION

    Synod working document encourages cautious optimism

    • John Warhurst
    • 05 July 2023
    11 Comments

    As the Vatican releases the working document for the first Synod on Synodality, reactions within the Catholic community are mixed. While many applaud its open approach to divisive issues, others deem it too progressive or insufficiently thorough. Australian bishops encourage engagement, but the road ahead poses significant challenges.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Artificing intelligence

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 March 2023
    6 Comments

    Who will champion humane values, enshrine them in the development and workings of artificial intelligence? This is the question posed by Plato and Socrates to our generation, and one that demands our urgent attention as the line between the artificial and the human becomes increasingly blurred.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    From Paradise lost to Paradise regained

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 September 2022
    2 Comments

    To address climate change demands concerned action that is built on people working together for the good of all. This in turn demands the recognition that the environment is not something different from us but part of us. Our personal good depends on the common good of our world.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Sharing a world both clean and not

    • Barry Gittins
    • 03 August 2022
    1 Comment

    History has repeatedly shown us that what gets us through a crisis, what helps us to recover and rebuild, is responding to it with prosocial behaviour ― working together, starting with our communities at the local level, and from there building mutually supportive relationships at and across every level of society. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    LaMDA and the (lack of) body

    • Julian Butler
    • 05 July 2022
    3 Comments

    Just over a fortnight ago Google suspended Blake Lemoine, an engineer for Google’s AI organisation, for publicly claiming a computer chatbot he was working on is sentient and thinks and reasons like a human. The publicity surrounding the suspension has raised questions about the development of artificial intelligence (AI), about our shared understanding of what it means to be conscious and sentient.  

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  • RELIGION

    Plenary Council fails to embrace Pope Francis’s wider social vision

    • Bruce Duncan
    • 21 June 2022
    3 Comments

    Some 278 Catholic bishops, clergy, religious personnel and lay people will meet as members of an unprecedented Plenary Council during 3-9 July to finalise the resolutions of their first assembly last year. However the May working document ‘Framework for Motions’, despite much worthy content, especially on Indigenous affairs, relies on a narrow notion of mission overly focused on inner-church issues at the expense of the wider social engagement that Francis emphasises.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Hope against hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 March 2022
    12 Comments

    Taken together the events of recent years suggest that we face a crisis, a time in which the working assumptions that have guided our personal and collective lives no longer hold. If we do not change we face increasing threats to the world that we shall hand on to our children. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Juvenile injustice

    • Julian Butler
    • 22 February 2022
    5 Comments

    Having previously spent time as lawyer working predominantly in the Children’s Court of Victoria, there isn’t too much about the State’s treatment of young people that shocks me. That is, until a few weeks ago when I was drawn to the final item of The Weekend Australian’s editorial column. Under the heading, ‘Hurt boy’s inhuman treatment’, was set out the details of a 15-year-old West Australian boy who had been ‘locked alone in a glass-walled observation cell of a juvenile detention centre in the southern suburbs of Perth for 79 days.’    

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The gifts of our limitations

    • Stephanie Kate Judd
    • 05 October 2021
    6 Comments

    When I was a teenager, something glitched in my brain and central nervous system and my hand stopped working. Over the course of a year, I went from playing in orchestras to being unable to hold a pencil; from being in the top team of every sport I played to being unable to throw a ball. I’d baffled the world’s top neurologists and exhausted every avenue of medical testing. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    Finance needs common sense, not cleverness

    • David James
    • 10 December 2020
    1 Comment

    The world’s financial markets are afflicted by a deep irrationality that imperils their very existence. On the surface, finance looks logical enough with its numbers, charts, mathematics, forecasts, ‘modelling’ and so on. But this only masks the fact that the system itself has been working on underlying assumptions that are either contradictory — such as that you can ‘deregulate’ finance when finance consists of rules — narrow minded or absurd.

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