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Search Results: Occupy

  • AUSTRALIA

    Is there a defence vote?

    • John Warhurst
    • 02 December 2014
    4 Comments

    The wider Defence community is now ascendant in the Australian community, yet the ADF has still suffered an effective cut in pay. Independent Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie is projecting herself as the defender of defence personnel and promising to vote against all government policy until the pay offer is upgraded. But there are strong reasons to suggest defence welfare may not have much of a political impact at the next election.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The return of the Jesuits

    • Frank Brennan
    • 07 August 2014
    31 Comments

    Everyone knows the Jesuits have had a rocky history. They were fabulously successful in educating the European elite for quite some time. But things went off the rails badly in the eighteenth century, and in 1773 Pope Clement XIV issued a decree to 'abolish and suppress the oft-mentioned Society'. Eventually his successor Pope Pius VII issued a papal bull restoring the Society, two hundred years ago this week.

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  • RELIGION

    Social justice with a smile

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 February 2014
    7 Comments

    Social justice has to do with what we owe to others. No one likes to think of their debts. And when the debts are universalised so that they are owed by us as members of society, we do not want to know about them. No wonder it is more effective to appeal to our individual generosity than to our shared duty, and for religious leaders to be less comfortable speaking about justice than about love.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2013: It's time to recognise secular same sex marriage

    • Frank Brennan
    • 08 January 2014
    59 Comments

    The US Supreme Court and our newly installed Prime Minister have put their weight behind legal recognition of same sex marriage. In California alone there are already 40,000 children who are being brought up by same sex couples. In this debate we need to be mindful of the wellbeing and dignity of these children as well as the unknown number in future who will be created in a test tube.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Supermarket self-regulation is a joke

    • David James
    • 10 December 2013
    15 Comments

    It is hard not to smile over Woolworths' and Coles' 'voluntary' adoption of a code of conduct. Now that the duopoly has decided to mend its ways, it seems it can occupy the moral high ground and preach to everyone else. The Western world has been subject to a quarter of a century of propaganda about the virtues of deregulation. A closer consideration of the supermarket giants' promise to do the right thing offers little reason for confidence.

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  • MEDIA

    Rights and wrongs of ABC spy reports

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 29 November 2013
    14 Comments

    The ABC does not have a special responsibility to be 'diplomatic' in deciding what to report and what not to report. It does not have an obligation to adjust its news judgments to implicitly support government policies, or to weigh up what the majority of the public might think to do in such a situation. It must only exercise its professional judgment as to 'news value', and be accountable for it.

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  • EDUCATION

    Equipping students for moral argument

    • Frank Brennan
    • 30 September 2013

    Full text from Frank Brennan's lecture 'Law teachers as gatekeepers of law, public morality and human rights: Equipping our students for moral argument in a pluralistic legal environment' at the Australian Law Teachers Association Annual Conference 2013.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    It's time to recognise secular same sex marriage

    • Frank Brennan
    • 12 July 2013
    97 Comments

    The US Supreme Court and our newly installed Prime Minister have put their weight behind legal recognition of same sex marriage. In California alone there are already 40,000 children who are being brought up by same sex couples. In this debate we need to be mindful of the wellbeing and dignity of these children as well as the unknown number in future who will be created in a test tube.

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  • RELIGION

    Ratzinger and Rowan Williams side by side

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 14 February 2013
    21 Comments

    Now that Williams has returned to academic life and Ratzinger has resigned, it is tempting to commit both their reigns to the category of failure, and debate mostly the nobility or otherwise of their inability to bend lurching structures or less gifted minds to their own wills. This would not, however, be the whole picture in either case.

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  • RELIGION

    Resignation of a teacher-Pope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 February 2013
    25 Comments

    When Joseph Ratzinger was elected many Catholics were surprised, some alarmed. They identified him with the stern disciplinary actions and doctrinal intransigence of the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith, and assumed he'd bring the same narrow focus to his leadership of the Church. The reality has been different. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Drowning rats of Wall Street

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 August 2012

    Eric Packer is 'the one per cent', who stoically discusses economics with his chief advisor even as an anti-capitalist protest broils outside his limousine; Occupy reimagined as animal anarchy, with protestors yielding spray-paint and dead rats; 'the 99 per cent' of the besieged city raging to reassert their worth.

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  • MEDIA

    How to tame free speech extremists

    • John Wright
    • 05 June 2012
    11 Comments

    'I still believe in global warming. Do you?' These words graced a Chicaco billboard above an image of 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski. It was removed, not because it broke any law, but because it was deemed to have 'gone too far'. In a society that supports free speech, who decides how far is too far?' 

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