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'If I'm deported back to Sri Lanka, torture is certain because I'm a Tamil.' On the day I hear of Leo's death I pass a tall maple, its star-like leaves, blood-red and flame-red, irradiated. The Australian government refused the visas applied for by Leo's family so that they might attend his funeral. As three Tamil men at a microphone sing a long hymn in Tamil the Basilica fills with an undertow of sound.
Like Australia's Gonski reforms, Indonesia's initiatives are designed to give its economy a competitive edge by upgrading its human resources. But the changes also have the potential to radically transform Indonesia in other ways. Future generations who have been encouraged to think for themselves, to question and to criticise will be very different citizens to their forbears.
Pearson and I scarcely ever agreed about anything, but I look back on the Adelaide Review's ragtag, cavalier youth with gratitude and affection. Likewise my time as a columnist with the brazen, short-lived Melbourne Partisan magazine. They were heady days, fuelled by rampant idealism, up-jumped confidence, booze, and the erratic, fortunate combination of various talents.
Free speech is not at risk, and the media companies know it. Their real fears concern the proposed Public Interest Media Advocate's task to determine whether future mergers and acquisitions are in the public interest. The outcry is motivated by self-interest, not concern for the rights and freedoms of citizens.
Australian journalists' tendency to conflate the UK Leveson inquiry's recommendations with those of Australia's Finkelstein inquiry is ill-informed. This blurring in the minds of journalists, publishers and the wider public is a reminder of the anger that spawned the inquiries, and a broad hint about their likely consequences.
Author Kathy Lette recalls: 'We girls were little more than a life support system to a pair of breasts ... Once I realised Germaine Greer wasn't just rhyming slang for beer, I wanted to write down our story.' Puberty Blues is what you get when teenage girls with a grudge show the world what they're made of.
The Prime Minister has demanded states regulate the price of electricity. News Ltd continues its campaign against further regulation of newspapers. Regulation brings into play two values that stand in tension: individual freedom and solidarity. The trick is to regulate so that personal freedom is enhanced in a way that serves the good of all.
US comedian Daniel Tosh sparked a furore with his now notorious rape joke. Many women have at least one story about being inappropriately and non-consensually touched — it first happened to me when I was 13. While jokes like Tosh's perpetuate such a culture, other comedians' 'rape jokes' seek to enlighten as well as entertain.
It is commonly thought that men represent both the main producers and consumers of pornography. Germaine Greer points out that men are also its victims. In the case of gay porn, just because there is no woman involved doesn't mean that it is not exploitative.
Marzieh Vafamehr, the Iranian actor awaiting corporal punishment in Iran for acting in a subversive Australian film, is the victim of a legal system that has abandoned any pretence to public interest. I'm drawn to this case as I, too, am a young woman forging my own way in the arts.
In the Australian media landscape, Eureka Street is countercultural, giving space to younger writers such as Ellena Savage. She edited Melbourne University's student newspaper Farrago in 2010, following a range of luminaries including Geoffrey Blainey, Morag Fraser, Lindsay Tanner, Kate Legge, Christos Tsiolkas and Nam Le.