Keywords: Forgotten Children
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AUSTRALIA
A proposal to take decisions around welfare payments out of politicians' hands is the best way forward. If the major parties are going to put supporting the most vulnerable in the 'too hard' basket, let an independent commission determine the rates at which various welfare payments can allow people to live a dignified life.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 18 February 2019
'We can do this better by breaking down the silos and binding together our concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.' Opening Keynote Address by Fr Frank Brennan SJ at the Catholic Social Services Australia National Conference, Port Macquarie 19 February 2019.
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AUSTRALIA
- Celeste Liddle
- 22 January 2019
16 Comments
This Invasion Day, instead of calling on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to conform to simplistic solutions such as changing the date of a public holiday geared around reinforcing jingoism and nationalism, walk alongside us and commit to doing better.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Denham Grierson
- 13 November 2018
4 Comments
It feels odd to be recycled, my atoms billions of years old, stretching back millennia. What adventures they have had, enterprises begun, projects explored, voyages completed.
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RELIGION
- Michael McVeigh
- 23 October 2018
17 Comments
Survivors and their families have been at the centre of this story, and now it's theirs to carry. For years, the people who maintained they were victims of abuse were told that they were trapped in a story about something that had happened to them when they were children. But that wasn't the story they were in at all.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Bee Spencer
- 26 September 2018
10 Comments
Day by day, home owners in this Canberra street scout out potential wealth and children walk to school, unaware of who they've attached their names to. Mick Shann wasn't just any public official and his legacy lives on in other places. In scars carved into the backs of miraculous survivors. In empty coffins and overflowing graves.
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AUSTRALIA
- Jana Favero
- 12 September 2018
7 Comments
It's hard to reconcile the reality for children on Nauru with our comfortable lives, especially when politicians repeatedly tell us that there aren't kids on Nauru or that medical professionals are exaggerating the problem or asserting it's just behavioural issues with the children. Would our leaders really deceive us?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jenny Blackford
- 10 September 2018
These days, the military tattoo is just too sad for words, the soldier-children twirling, dancing, fluting, prancing, singing, some with rightful Maori marks, or cheekbones high as Indian hills, thin teenage girls in kilts and fancy Argyle socks ... What have they to do with war or death? Yet men strap bombs on ten-year-olds.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ian C. Smith
- 31 July 2018
In Tahiti I fall ill, bronchitis amid humid splendour. At a summer camp in Dutchess County I get the sack. Cops warn me for hitch-hiking after sundown in Maine. In the wintry Cotswolds I wheeze in a bedewed attic. A lost aunt is found in Liverpool post-Toxteth.
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AUSTRALIA
- Sarah Maddison
- 24 May 2018
6 Comments
Progressive Australians want a process that restores a sense of moral legitimacy to the nation. But far from concern about settler Australia's moral legitimacy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples seek treaty as recognition of their political difference. Treaties on these terms are unlikely to be acceptable to the settler state.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 12 May 2018
2 Comments
On the surface budgets are exercises in financial accountability. At a deeper level they are best understood as a yearly ritual; one of the ways in which rulers acknowledge and try to manipulate truths about state power. We should evaluate these less on their stated intentions but with what the show of competence and generosity reveals.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michele Madigan
- 24 April 2018
13 Comments
Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, NITV re-screened Richard Frankland's 1993 documentary Who Killed Malcolm Smith? Watching it, it became totally clear to me about Manus Island and Nauru. Perhaps as a nation this violence, this contempt of the 'other', is in our DNA.
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