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A source quoted on a TV news report said the forthcoming Liberal Party attack ads would 'make the Somme look like a Sunday afternoon picnic'. Crass and disrespectful of the victims of the First World War killing ground, the remark saw fit to compare our political process to a mindless slaughter. Similarly, in Labor's Grim Reaper style ads, hapless 'victims' of Coalition policies are consigned to oblivion.
In ten days I will cast a vote for the first time. I must admit that - unlike many teenagers my age - I do take an interest in political affairs. I know how parliament works and occasionally watch political shows on the ABC. My brother has told me that this is 'really sad'. Voting will be better than receiving a fine in the mail from the Australian Electoral Commission.
Disrepute and disaster are twins. If suspicion persists that football players were encouraged to take drugs whose long term effects are unknown, it would lead parents to discourage their children from playing the game at senior level, with incalculable commercial consequences. It is a much more serious thing to bring a nation's polity into disrepute. And that sadly is what the military rulers of Egypt have done.
When James Hird, coach of the Essendon Football Club, says his club has a 'right' to play finals despite the ongoing drug scandal, he obviously means that the players have won enough games to qualify. But when you wed his use of the word 'right' to his often proclaimed love for the club and his aspiration to put it back where it 'belonged', 'right' starts to assume the force of due privilege.
The common good can seem a very milky-tea concept — too bloodless for the real world. But it is an important idea, one which we need if we are to make sense of phenomena as disparate as the findings on corruption in the awarding of mining licenses in NSW, the initial report of the NSW chief scientist on coal seam gas mining, and the daily excursions in the drugs and footballers epic.
His casual tone didn't seem to fit the words I was translating from Spanish. I questioned him. Eight? Yes, eight. Every night? Every night. Finally I could no longer deny what I was hearing. Decades earlier, my amigo's then eight-year-old brother had been abused by a religious man of the cloth. My amigo was here walking the Camino Mozárabe in memory of that brother, who eventually had committed suicide.
Welcome to Nauru. Land area: 21 square kilometres. Permanent population: around 10,000. Chief economic activity: human dumping ground. Nauru has joined PNG in the Cohort of the Willing — willing, that is, to take dollops of Australian money to hide away an Australian problem. Substitute 'asylum seekers' for 'convicts' and it recalls the way Australia was used by Great Britain in the 18th century to dispose of a British problem.
AFL footballer Liam Jurrah had his prison sentence for an assault conviction reduced to three months. Hopefully he will not be too harmed by his experience, and afterwards may be given the chance to recommence his football career. But the conditions confronting his cousins and brothers will not change. In the NT there is a troubling confluence between harsher penalties and increasing incarceration rates.
Robinson's recent book on the culture of the Catholic Church critiques the factors that have contributed to clerical sexual abuse of children. Robinson desires institutional changes, yet institutional changes are insufficient unless relationships and attitudes change. In this there is a happy conjunction between Robinson's project and the way of proceeding of Pope Francis.
One of the intriguing features of Pope Francis is the contrast between his earthy and free way with words and the laboured earnestness of those exploring his words for hidden meanings. It is like watching Martians deploy a bomb disposal unit to deal with the football a kid has kicked into their spaceship. The incongruity is humorous but it also points to a sclerosis in public conversations.
His body itself is a symbol of his inherited power and privilege. He hears women talk about being afraid to go out at night alone. He sees the great strides women have made in the workforce, yet sits in management meetings where nine out of ten leaders are men. He sees bikini clad women on his television screen and feels guilty at admiring their bodies.
Religions are mesmerised and ruined by power but always pregnant with the possibility of humility. They are so easy to ignore. You'd be wise to sneer, with every reason imaginable for the curl of your knowing lip. Yet here I am, on Sunday morning, in the wedding reception tent, agog; not so much at the earnest idiot of a minister, but at everyone, sweetly, else.