Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Excision

  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2023: How Australia's asylum seeker policy has evolved over thirty years

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 04 January 2024

    Throughout recent decades of Australian history, the stance every government has taken on asylum seekers has reflected the shifting political landscapes and challenging humanitarian issues that have continually shaped Australia's response to those seeking refuge. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Three steps back and one step forward: Three decades of asylum seekers in Australia

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 28 July 2023

    How has Australia's asylum seeker policy changed over the past thirty years? The approach of every government has reflected the shifting political landscapes and challenging humanitarian issues that have continually shaped Australia's response to those seeking refuge. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Devaluing freedom

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 September 2022
    8 Comments

    Recently many people have expressed disquiet about the trend to authoritarian rule throughout the world. They have good reason for doing so. In the world we are entering, the freedom of citizens in the State depends on the will of Governments that will have no enforceable obstacle to withdrawing such freedoms on suspicion of future misconduct and not just for punishment of past, proven misconduct. 

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The Tampa legacy 20 years on

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 07 September 2021
    23 Comments

    It took 438 desperate human beings upon the overladen wooden fishing boat, the KM Palapa, to present Australia’s Howard government in August 2001 with an electoral opportunity. At first, there was feigned ignorance from Canberra about any signs of desperation. The vessel, lacking power, lay some 100km off Christmas Island. Despite a coast guard plane noting men jumping up and down on the roof in a frenzy, nothing was initially done.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We gather to remember

    • Geoff Page
    • 08 December 2020
    1 Comment

    Twenty-five years from his death we gather to remember, swapping anecdotes like bank notes weathered in our wallets. The one on how as deputy he’d learn, while pausing in a doorway, the names of all three hundred new Year Sevens in a week. And how when actors failed to show for one of his rehearsals, he’d stride the stage himself.  

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    We all need to know about endometriosis

    • Susie Ray
    • 02 March 2020
    3 Comments

    This March is endometriosis awareness month. My eight year journey to receiving diagnosis was a road paved with misdiagnoses, misinformed doctors, medical professionals disregarding my pain (some being outright rude) and poor education of gynaecological health. No one should suffer this road and, most importantly, no one should suffer it alone.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The small-l liberal tradition of brutal border control

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 12 July 2013
    8 Comments

    Many on the left might shudder at the mention of Philip Ruddock or think that his views on migration control were extreme and 'illiberal'. But in fact his views rested on mainstream liberal ideas of limited freedom. In Australia the concepts offered by the liberal tradition have been employed by both sides of politics to give a 'reasonable' varnish to inhumane migration control policies.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Australia's morality drifts with asylum seeker bodies

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 June 2013
    20 Comments

    Sometimes events take on a significance beyond their historical context. That was the case with Gallipoli and the Eureka Stockade. It may also prove to be the case with the bodies left in the water after an asylum seeker boat sank, and the delay by the Australian authorities to take responsibility for their recovery.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    We all lose when governments trash the law

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 December 2012
    15 Comments

    Evidence about the persecution of returned Sri Lankan asylum seekers calls into question the justice of summary repatriation. And the actions of the Australian Government have thrown doubt on its legality. The rule of law is a delicate web of relationships that protects the weak from the tyranny of the great, and we are all weaker when it is broken. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Flying sofas in the Great Australian Dystopia

    • Barry Gittins
    • 05 December 2012
    4 Comments

    Hindrance Day was conceived as a means of commemorating the millions of acts of self-indulgence that marked the First Gillard-Abbott war on unAustralians. The concept of two minutes' ignorance was popularly adopted across what was left of the civilised world and became a key ritual of the annual celebrations.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Labor stops short on migration and disability reform

    • Moira Byrne Garton
    • 05 December 2012
    8 Comments

    In 2001, a Pakistani man granted refugee status set himself on fire outside the Australian Parliament House. Visas for his wife and three daughters had been rejected because one daughter had cerebral palsy. While immigration policy has since become less discriminatory towards people experiencing disability, important barriers still remain.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's bad job of asylum seeker policy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 November 2012
    11 Comments

    You can tell bad policy making by the trail of broken human lives it leaves behind it. The image of asylum seekers held in tents on Nauru, many on hunger strike and at least one now in risk of death, will surely be followed by images of people withering from depression and resentment and needing medical care.

    READ MORE