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Keywords: Ambassador

  • AUSTRALIA

    Gillard chalks up a win in China

    • Tony Kevin
    • 11 April 2013
    4 Comments

    The Rudd years, like the Howard years, were years of stasis, even regression, in Australia-China relations. Refreshingly, Julia Gillard chalked up a major foreign policy success this week, putting Australia-China relations back on the track trailblazed by Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke many years ago.

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  • RELIGION

    Risks of betting on the papal election

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 February 2013
    22 Comments

    Betting on the papal election is a mug punter's game, not because of the intervention of the Holy Spirit, but because there is little relevant form. If you lock people up to discuss at length who is the best candidate, and ensure there is no stable talk, the market is uninformed. So bolters can emerge and run away with the race.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Reconciliation in Australia and East Timor

    • Mark Green
    • 14 February 2013
    4 Comments

    I was in Dili on Apology Day 2008, and wept as I listened on the radio to the Apology offered by Kevin Rudd. The previous year, I had arrived in Dili to take up a post with an aid and development program, and was accosted by a very angry young man. 'What are you doing here? Have you come to make us like your Aboriginal people?'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mortality made articulate

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 29 January 2013
    2 Comments

    For what, I ask you, was somebody called our saviour in the turbulent middle-east (still in trouble, of course it must be) two long Ks ago? Light flickered on dwellers in death's dark shadow yet those turbulent sandy nations truckle on, just where their ancestors ambled out of Africa toward the hideogram of history.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    America's choice through Australian eyes

    • Tony Kevin
    • 01 November 2012
    9 Comments

    If citizens of other nations could vote, it should be Obama by a mile! Outsiders are perplexed by polling that suggests a cliffhanger in the contest between the incumbent Obama and the Republican compromise candidate Romney. The issues – many of which are vital for Australia – are clear, but the outcome is not.

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  • RELIGION

    Advancing human rights in Australia

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 October 2012
    1 Comment

    Full text from Fr Frank Brennan SJ's address 'Advancing human rights in Australia — lessons from the National Human Rights Consultation' at the 'Human Rights Matters!' conference marking Anti-Poverty Week 2012. 17 October 2012, Cardinal Knox Centre, St Patricks Cathedral, Melbourne.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Communist China keeps a grip on the gun

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 15 October 2012
    3 Comments

    Many people know Mao's famous dictum, 'Power comes from the barrel of the gun'. Fewer people know the second part: that 'the Party must control the gun'. The Party could allow last month's street protests because they unified the people against a hated enemy in Japan. But the protests were carefully controlled.

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  • RELIGION

    Six challenges for Indigenous researchers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 21 August 2012

    Text is from Fr Frank Brennan SJ's opening keynote address at the Higher Degree Research Retreat, Rydges Eaglehawk, Canberra, 4 August 2012.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Assange tests British diplomatic principle

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 August 2012
    21 Comments

    Julian Assange sits securely in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, as Cardinal József Mindszenty did for years inside the US Embassy in Communist-ruled Hungary. This is a benefit of the Vienna Convention. If Britain violated this principle by storming or cutting off utilities to the Embassy, the diplomatic protection of its officials and their families around the world would be weakened immediately.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The dubious removal of Paraguay's former bishop president

    • Rodrigo Acuña
    • 03 July 2012
    6 Comments

    The recent ouster of Paraguay’s left-wing president Fernando Lugo probably broke some type of world record. Having had just two hours to prepare his defence, the leader who was once 'Bishop of the poor' described his impeachment as a 'parliamentary coup d’état'. He had a point.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Spoor of a soul

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 08 May 2012
    3 Comments

    At sleep's near edge I busily ask myself — redundantly, rather — where soul might have its home: Like the golden tumbling apricots right next door attending on Christmas, my body has attained what another age would have called a certain age.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What Australia doesn't want East Timor to know

    • Pat Walsh
    • 05 April 2012
    10 Comments

    The famine of 1977–79 cut a swathe through East Timor's civilian population. Having failed to subdue the Timorese, the Indonesian military opted to starve them out. Details from that little-understood period are contained in cables that Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has blocked from public access.

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