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Keywords: Bad Refugees

  • RELIGION

    I am unashamedly pro-life, but let me tell you what that means

    • Beth Doherty
    • 19 May 2022
    10 Comments

    I have always considered myself pro-life. It’s not something I’ve felt a need to wear as a badge of honour, rather it has always been a default position. But terminology matters. Indeed, frequently, calling myself pro-life has drawn the derision or raised eyebrows of people around me, nuns and priests and radical ratbags alike, it has connotations.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    April is the cruellest month

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 April 2022
    6 Comments

    Palm Sunday alternates between March and April. When, as this year, it is celebrated in April it keeps company with a number of days that provoke us to ask what and who matter, what and whom can you trust. If it is a cruel month, it is so because it tests, even mocks, our comfortable assumptions. In a year overshadowed by manifestations of climate change, of persistence of Covid and of the horrors of war, it is not a bad month to endure an election.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The case for basic, public values

    • Greg Craven
    • 25 January 2022
    53 Comments

    One reasonably could ask whether this is the moment to write a book about the potential of Catholic Social Theory to contribute to Australian politics and policy. After all, the Church is still struggling to come to terms with decades of child abuse, hardly a recommendation for social potential. We currently also are attempting to make sense of a Plenary that is both confused and confusing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Unnecessary red tape aimed at silencing charities

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 August 2021
    9 Comments

    Last Wednesday, the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Delegated Legislation chaired by the Government’s Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells tabled a report highlighting problems with a proposed new regulation affecting charities.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Dreyfus redivivus

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 March 2021
    18 Comments

    Any government decision can cause hurt to some groups in society. There is a difference, however, between decisions that are only painful and those that are vindictive. The former may be regretted, but vindictiveness implies a satisfaction in causing pain that does not arise out of need. The reason for it must be sought in the minds and hearts and culture of those who devise the policies.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Refugees are the canaries in the mine

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 October 2020
    8 Comments

    If society were a mine, refugees would be the canaries in it. Their condition reveals whether the currents of public air are pure or toxic. By that standard the present currents in Australia are noxious. They mark a change from the first generous response to the coronavirus to the meaner reconstruction of the economy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The theatre of distance

    • John Allison
    • 25 November 2019
    2 Comments

    I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Conversations with refugees in PNG

    • Joshua Lourensz
    • 19 November 2019
    5 Comments

    'Refugees/not refugees — here it is all the same,' a man tells me with a shrug. There seems to be both recognition of the impossibility of the situation for all who have been left here — but also an attitude that no one should be left behind.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The secretive business of detention dirty work

    • Meg Mundell
    • 21 August 2019
    8 Comments

    If you're not burdened by a conscience, it's a perfect get-rich-quick scheme: offer 'garrison' services to governments reluctant to get their hands dirty. Ensure the vulnerable people you 'manage' are hidden, demonised by politicians and right-wing commentators. Hire cheap labour, minimise your tax, and make millions.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Combating crime by restoring relationships

    • Andrew Hamilton and Madison Rosaia
    • 26 July 2019
    6 Comments

    When devising policies for people on the margins, Australian governments seem always to settle on punitive measures. Although imprisonment has a place in penal policy, the focus should be on the persons who perpetrate crime and on those who are damaged by it. Penal policy is ultimately about ensuring just relationships.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Shifting views of Israel and Palestine

    • Teresa Pirola
    • 06 May 2019
    14 Comments

    I am on a study tour of Israel and Palestinian Territories. It is my eighth visit over 12 years, and each time I come away with less clarity and more questions about the tensions that plague this tiny land. Who is the oppressor? Who is the oppressed? It all depends upon the lens you look through at any given moment.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Sudanese Lost Boy's long walk comes to life

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 30 April 2019
    5 Comments

    When refugees write accounts of their lives they usually express gratitude to the nation that has received them. A Child Escapes, in which Francis Deng describes his life from Lost Boy of Sudan to refugee in Kenya to bank employee in Australia, is no exception. Left unsaid, but equally important, is the gift he and other immigrants are to Australia.

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