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Keywords: Ben

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • RELIGION

    St Benedict and communities: not to retreat from the world, but to engage deeply in it

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 July 2021
    14 Comments

    Benedict’s rule anticipates and handles the weakness inherent in enthusiastic movements led by charismatic leaders to leave the world. They import into the communities the power-based relationships in the world that they left.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rule of lucre

    • Martin Pike
    • 01 June 2021
    13 Comments

    The fact is that money still buys a better service from the legal system, and to claim otherwise is to throw out the most basic principles of an economy. After all, if there were no benefit to be gained from backing up a truck full of money and tipping 30 or 40 grand a day into a team of silks, junior barristers and top tier solicitors, why would those with the means do it? To argue the contrary beggars belief. And if the observation is accepted, what does that tell us about the rule of law?

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  • ECONOMICS

    When economic policy transcends political division

    • David James
    • 08 April 2021
    5 Comments

    It is one of the ironies of Australian political history that a policy that has profoundly benefited this country’s version of capitalism came, not from the right, but from the Labor party and unions. The mandating of superannuation payments in 1992 under the Keating government has profoundly changed Australia’s financial system.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A legacy worth leaving

    • Najma Sambul
    • 18 March 2021
    21 Comments

    I never had to confront the idea that the British monarchy — and the British Empire at large — was built on racist principles and benefitted from racist practices. Not until it came from the mouth of one of the Royal family’s favourite iconoclasts, Meghan Markle.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    The value of the worker

    • Ursula Stephens
    • 25 February 2021
    13 Comments

    'It's the value of the work, not the worker.' So said a government backbencher to me last week while I was speaking to him about the omnibus industrial relations (IR) Bill that has just passed the House of Representatives.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatism: obscuring ideology in Australian politics

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 09 February 2021
    30 Comments

    The celebration of pragmatism in Australian politics obscures the role that ideology has always already played. In fact, one of the more stealthily ideological moves in Australian politics, generally made within that swirl of commitments people call ‘centrism’, is the de-politicisation of policy — the attempt to present policy as responsive to natural imperatives rather than to specific values and ideals.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tis the times' plague

    • Brian Matthews
    • 24 November 2020
    5 Comments

    In measures now sadly familiar in 2020, theatres were closed once the number of weekly deaths exceeded 30, later 40, but because actors and the theatre world itself were so economically vulnerable, actors, understandably intent on earning a living, soon legally or otherwise cut themselves some slack by taking liberties with the rules governing performances and quarantine — again, a phenomenon that is now, against all previous odds, familiar to people of 2020.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learn to live with a mountain between us

    • Wally Swist
    • 27 October 2020

    We might have learned that we can no longer feed on the leaves at the tops of the crowns, but need to bend our long necks, which we carry on our small body and relatively short legs, and we have retrained ourselves to consume the leaves on the lower limbs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Father shows best

    • Barry Gittins
    • 03 September 2020
    7 Comments

    I have been thinking for several months about fathering and wisdom. To my surprise, I found some of Marcus Aurelius’ truisms to be reflected, if erratically, by the pronouncements of my own pater familias, Kenneth Hugh Gittins.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Looking back to look forward

    • Dustin Halse
    • 30 July 2020
    4 Comments

    In Australia, we have long boasted of our unparalleled prosperity and strong economic growth. We have championed home ownership and the quarter acre block — after all our home is meant to be our castle. But for too many, the basic human right of having a place to call home remains out of reach.

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  • EDUCATION

    Racism has no place in education

    • J O Acholonu
    • 21 July 2020
    6 Comments

    Too often in academic settings Black and Brown children are dismissed when reporting their experiences, and the incidents are often downplayed. They are told that the student who had done or said the racist thing ‘didn’t really mean it’. These students are given the benefit of doubt in ways that Black and Brown children often are not.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trauma and displacement are no time for profit

    • Salina Cheung
    • 13 July 2020
    4 Comments

    There is a trend of liberals calling for the West to open its borders to fleeing Hongkongers for economic benefit. It is commendable that these individuals want the West to offer Hongkongers refuge. But to frame this philanthropy in such mercenary terms makes this goodwill suspect: these voices want to capitalise on a traumatic moment of displacement.

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