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Keywords: 000

  • AUSTRALIA

    Mexican border reflections on Australian asylum seeker policy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 15 August 2014
    30 Comments

    We Australians confront none of the complexities of sharing a land border with a poor neighbour. Most Americans, I find, consider our policy morally repulsive and just stupid. They cannot believe that we routinely lock up children, that we recently held 157 people on a ship in the Indian Ocean for almost a month, and that we are now going to send up to 1000 asylum seekers to Cambodia.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    I am Gaza, I am bleeding

    • Lyn Bender
    • 15 August 2014
    9 Comments

    In the last month, an estimated 2000 Palestinians including 400 children have been killed and 10,000 injured.  Much of Gaza is reduced to rubble and rendered uninhabitable. It was a 30 degree day in Gaza as our small band of around 20 kept vigil in the cold night rain at Melbourne’s Federation Square. A Muslim girl recited a poem, ‘I am Gaza I have a dagger in my heart. I am bleeding’.

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  • EDUCATION

    More to tertiary education shake-up than $100,000 degrees

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 25 July 2014
    3 Comments

    Christopher Pyne's proposed changes to tertiary education place many theological providers in an interesting situation. We have seen a number of theological colleges enter into relationships with universities to assist with their financial bottom line, in the face of falling support from their church constituencies. If private providers are to receive government funding directly, we could see some of these arrangements begin to fall apart.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Dubious heroes of Wikipedia

    • Philip Harvey
    • 23 July 2014
    6 Comments

    Swedish physicist Sverker Johansson has reportedly written over 2.7 million articles on Wikipedia since 2001, at an average of 10,000 articles a day. Phil Parker is purported to be the most published author in history, successfully publishing over 85,000 physical books, each of which takes less than an hour to 'write' — 'patented algorithms enable computers to do all the heavy lifting'. But the real work begins after they have finished.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Bittersweet victory for the Mothers of Srebrenica

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 21 July 2014
    1 Comment

    Last week the Dutch Supreme Court found that the Netherlands was liable for the deaths of over 300 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Hercegovina in July 1995. They had been part of a group of 5000 refugees, who had been sheltering with Dutch UN peacekeepers known as Dutchbat and were handed over to Serb forces in exchange for 14 Dutch peacekeepers. A historical arrangement had been writ in blood.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bishop's aid crusade must heed the poor

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 20 June 2014
    3 Comments

    Pope Francis and Julie Bishop both spoke this week, with passion and within days of each other, about how to address poverty in the world's poorest countries. Bishop launched a framework of new performance benchmarks, and her desire to improve accountability and transparency in Australia's aid program is to be commended. Hopefully the framework holds the voices of the poor and marginalised at its centre.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Harsh home truths for returned asylum seekers

    • Paul White
    • 07 April 2014
    13 Comments

    Returnees to the Congo have been harassed, imprisoned and tortured by state authorities. Some have disappeared altogether. Forced returnees to Sri Lanka are routinely detained and quite often suffer torture. Hazaras returned to Afghanistan are persecuted due to their ethnicity and their adherence to the Shi'a sect. Australia continues to forcibly return asylum seekers, placing them in tremendous danger, ignoring a 2000 Senate Committee recommendation.

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  • RELIGION

    Thinking Christians spurn hammy creationism

    • Chris Middleton
    • 18 February 2014
    33 Comments

    Australian-born creationist Ken Ham argues that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, that God created man and all land animals on the same day 6000 years ago, and that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. The relationship between faith and reason goes to the credibility of being a Christian in the modern world. A minority view within Christianity should not be allowed to frame a false dichotomy between religion and science.

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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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  • AUSTRALIA

    Prioritising homelessness

    • Cec Shevels
    • 15 October 2013
    7 Comments

    In the 2006 Census, the number of homeless exceeded 100,000 for the first time. Kevin Rudd described this as a national disgrace and promised to cut the number in half by 2020. His Labor Government did make some progress — there was a fall in the number of rough sleepers and there was a welcome reduction in homelessness among Aboriginal people. Yet by 2011, the homeless numbers had risen again.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Parent education is better than child protection

    • Michael Mullins
    • 02 September 2013
    6 Comments

    There are 60,000 children in the community whose lives are so dangerous at home that they need monitoring by government child protection services that are habitually stretched to their limits. But there would be less need for such services if governments put money into education programs that teach people how to be better parents.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The distraction of red lines in Syria

    • Evan Ellis
    • 27 August 2013
    5 Comments

    In some ways the intense focus on chemical weapons and red lines is diversionary. Enough blood has been spilt to paint a thousand red lines. 100,000+ people have been killed already. Is it somehow easier on the International Community’s conscience to think of families being ripped apart by artillery shells than dying from chemical warfare? 

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