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The girl at the centre of the ongoing AFL sex scandal presents herself as a woman scorned. In truth she's a child in need of protection. Child protection laws once enabled police to ask a court to have a girl made a ward of state if she appeared to be 'in moral danger'.
Rudd's cold rebuttal of Assange's mother's appeal to him is most unworthy. To say Assange has been offered consular assistance does not answer her. David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib received similarly worthless consular access.
Three years since Kevin Rudd's National Apology to the Stolen Generations, discriminatory aspects of John Howard's Intervention are still in place. Let's hope that by the fourth anniversary, we are no longer singling out Aborigines for such 'special treatment'.
It would be regrettable if an attack by Cardinal Pell and the Australian Christian Lobby on the 'anti-Christian' Greens could be construed as an indirect shot across the bows of the atheist Prime Minister. On some policy issues the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties.
Cardinal Pell, with whom I have voiced disagreement, preached superbly at the mass of thanksgiving after the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. 'She does not deter us from struggling to follow her.' As we wrestle with the common good, let's make a place for all our fellow citizens.
There is an emerging Aboriginal middle class. The contested questions in those communities relate to the expensive delivery of services including health, housing and education. The contested issue in the urban community is over self-identification as Aboriginal by persons of mixed descent.
Now that we have a hung parliament, Greens leader Senator Bob Brown wants to agitate the issue of euthanasia once again. But a hung parliament will not have the time and resources to consider these complex issues in its early days.
Given that eruvs are inconspicuous, and religious freedom in Australia is a fait accompli, there can be only one explanation for the prevailing sentiment, and that is a subtle prejudice which represents the great big elephant in the room for anyone living on Sydney's North Shore.
The decision by a Swiss judge not to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the US has again triggered the debate about how artists are treated by the law. The case has been running simultaneously to that of Russian musician. The parallels are striking.
Fr Frank Brennan's address to the Melbourne College of Divinity Centenary Conference, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, 6 July 2010.
Kevin Rudd stood in the forecourt of Parliament House Canberra and recalled with great emotion the morning on which he had welcomed the members of the Stolen Generations. There was no mistaking his sense of solidarity: he knew there and then what it was to be dispossessed, alienated and outcast.