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Keywords: Nursing

  • AUSTRALIA

    Putting a value on a human life

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 October 2020
    7 Comments

    The response to COVID has invited reflection about the relative value of one human death (and so of one human life) as compared with another. This is a radical question because it makes us ask whether the value of a human life is defined by economic wellbeing and by potential contribution to the economy, or by deeper qualities.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The gift of work

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 August 2020
    6 Comments

    Amid the disruption of predictable life wrought by the coronavirus, governments have focused on jobs. Jobs lost in the response to the virus, and jobs created as we emerge from the crisis. The focus is worthy — behind each job lost is a person whose life has become anxious and uncertain. The language, however, is concerning. Defining the challenge as one of creating jobs expresses an understanding of work, the inadequacy of which the coronavirus has laid bare.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    An age of communal and civic responsibility?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 August 2020
    12 Comments

    If they are to enlist the support of their people in acting responsibly in the face of coronavirus, governments must themselves practice responsibility. They must look to the good of the whole community, and especially to disadvantaged people who are at the greatest risk of contracting the coronavirus.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Age and attitude

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 07 July 2020
    24 Comments

    I think it is not only our duty to look after the aged, but a task that brings its own reward in the form of companionship, expressed wisdom, and guidance as to how to manage life’s testing times. I have always had friends decades older than I, and those friendships have been a privilege.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    We're not all in this together, yet

    • David Manne and Laura John
    • 18 June 2020
    5 Comments

    This Refugee Week, many asylum seekers and refugees are struggling to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are trapped in immigration detention centres across the country in cramped and overcrowded conditions that make physical distancing impossible. Others are living in our community on temporary visas or no visas at all, struggling to make ends meet.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Year of the mask

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 June 2020
    5 Comments

    2020 has been the year of the mask. The masks worn during the smoke of bushfires, during the threat of COVID-19, and during the Black Lives Matter protests. Masks are a powerful and complex symbol.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The flawed ideology of healthcare as business

    • David James
    • 28 May 2020
    5 Comments

    Calling healthcare a business was always logically flawed. Money is involved, but it is unlike any consumer product businesses. For one thing, the ‘customer’ in health does not decide what represents value, the provider (the doctor or equivalent) does. Patients may have a say, but usually only on the margin.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Keeping vigil

    • Julie Perrin
    • 06 April 2020
    4 Comments

    While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.

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  • RELIGION

    Wash Day at Le Carmel, Lisieux, circa 1895

    • Rita Tognini
    • 28 January 2020
    5 Comments

    It's definitely the flesh and blood you, Thérèse, not the Little Flower of church statues and holy pictures, milky with sanctity. It's the frank-faced-child-in-lace-trimmed-dress-and-sturdy-boots you. It's the fourteen year old, hair-atop-head-in-a-bun-to-look-older-for-the-Bishop-so-he'll-let-you-take-the-veil you.

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  • RELIGION

    Light and life found in humiliation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 November 2019
    22 Comments

    Might the experience of humiliation open the possibility of turning out to others instead of in on oneself? Might it seed compassion for others in their humiliation, and lead in turn to a society more sensitive to the wounds that humiliation causes both to the humiliated and the bystanders?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Undoubting Thomas

    • Paul Scully
    • 27 May 2019

    I closed my eyes to draw new thought. When I reopened them an empty stone slab lay before me in a cavern rough-hollowed but flooded with a light that had penetrated its roof. Mary hovered in the light, as a gull is both sea and air, in a flowing robe, her outstretched hand bearing the cincture I would need to recount the mystery to the others.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    On first reading Boochani on Manus

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 May 2019
    10 Comments

    No Friend But the Mountains deservedly won an Australian prize but was considered ineligible for others because the writer was not Australian. The book itself mocks that exclusion. Boochani's years on Manus Island branded him as Australian in the same way African slaves became American by the brand American owners burned on to them.

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