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Keywords: Close The Gap

  • AUSTRALIA

    Guerilla diggers' East Timor debt

    • Paul Cleary
    • 25 August 2010
    3 Comments

    Hundreds of Timorese men and boys served alongide Australian fighters in an amazing guerilla campaign throughout 1942 that tied up several thousand Japanese troops while the battle for New Guinea was underway. Australia has made at best half-hearted efforts to acknowledge this debt.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Timor Diggers' guerilla war

    • Paul Cleary
    • 24 August 2010
    3 Comments

    Kevin Rudd's failure to embrace the Timor legend with more imagination and substance was a missed opportunity to connect with Labor's Second World War legacy. Wartime Prime Minister John Curtin saw the guerilla war in Timor as a unique and significant part of turning back the Japanese tide.

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  • RELIGION

    Letting Aboriginal Australians speak for themselves

    • Frank Brennan
    • 07 July 2010
    11 Comments

    Kevin Rudd stood in the forecourt of Parliament House Canberra and recalled with great emotion the morning on which he had welcomed the members of the Stolen Generations. There was no mistaking his sense of solidarity: he knew there and then what it was to be dispossessed, alienated and outcast.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Other unsung Indigenous heroes

    • Myrna Tonkinson
    • 07 July 2010
    1 Comment

    Not yet 40, she must live in Perth, hundreds of kilometres from home, to receive dialysis. She is currently in hospital recovering from spinal surgery, and so is separated even from her city-based loved ones. Yet she appears always with a beaming smile.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How my English teacher saved my life

    • Fiona Douglas
    • 30 June 2010
    18 Comments

    It occurred to me to approach my school English teacher. This would be normal enough, if not for the fact that she had been my teacher some three decades prior. From the fog of my depression medication I somehow found my phone and emailed her from my bed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Labor complacent as Indigenous gap widens

    • Jack Waterford
    • 18 May 2010
    5 Comments

    Seven houses — not bad for three and a half years work and hundreds of millions of dollars. At that rate the gap will be closed in about 7000 years. Minster Macklin frequently redefines what she is pretending to be doing, or uses weasel words.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rudd's apology was also our apology

    • Michael Mullins
    • 15 February 2010
    6 Comments

    On the second anniversary of the apology to Indigenous Australians, we look instinctively to the Prime Minister to tell us what he's done. He presented his report card to Parliament on Thursday. But he's not the only one who needs to account.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    MySchool: helping rich schools get richer

    • Tony Kevin
    • 03 February 2010
    7 Comments

    It is disingenuous for Labor education ministers' to say MySchool will create political pressure to boost 'under-performing' schools. Meanwhile parents, voting with their feet, may foster the very outcomes they fear: underprivileged, low-morale schools breeding a generation of alienated, under-achieving kids.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    'Communist' Bishop's prophetic vision

    • John Battle
    • 30 October 2009
    3 Comments

    'Prophets' don't predict the future; they read the complex signs that spell out how structures and systems generate poverty. Dom Helder Camara's words still speak to the financial crisis and the need to bring justice for the poor.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to talk to Aboriginal students

    • Myrna Tonkinson
    • 13 October 2009
    14 Comments

    Some Aboriginal languages do not distinguish the unvoiced and voiced consonants 'b' and 'p', 'd' and 't', and 'g' and 'k'. Julia Gillard's push to provide 'English as a second language' training to teachers in remote communities can address such language obstacles and help lift levels of Indigenous education.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to take the UN Indigenous report card

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 03 September 2009
    4 Comments

    The Rudd Government would be wise to ignore calls to 'bin' UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Human Rights' James Anaya's statement on the Intervention. Sometimes it takes an international body to condemn an obnoxious law or practice.

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  • RELIGION

    Stradbroke Island homily

    • Frank Brennan
    • 18 August 2009
    1 Comment

    Before the mission was established here, the local Aboriginal community of 200 persons was forced to host 1000 convicts from the mainland for eight years. I daresay not all the convicts were easy-going beachcombers.

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