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Keywords: Liberal

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • AUSTRALIA

    Religious discrimination laws coming to the boil

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 November 2021
    36 Comments

    It’s four years since the Australian Parliament amended the Marriage Act 1961 to provide that marriage means ‘the union of two people to the exclusion of all others’. The legislation followed the plebiscite on same sex marriage. To address the concerns of some religious groups, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull set up an expert panel chaired by long time Liberal Party minister Philip Ruddock to report on whether Australian law adequately protected the human right to freedom of religion. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Inequality in a time of pandemic

    • Tim Dunlop
    • 15 November 2021
    5 Comments

    The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has been like the aerosol used in those heist movies, where the cat burglar breaks into the museum and sprays the air to reveal the invisible lines of power that criss-cross the space between the door and cabinet where the treasure is kept.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why our defamation laws are no longer fit for purpose

    • Cristy Clark
    • 10 November 2021
    7 Comments

    Peter Dutton has recently argued that funds for defamation actions should be a ‘workplace entitlement’ for Members of Parliament (MPs). I’d like to repeat that another way: the Honorable Peter Dutton, Commonwealth Minister for Defence, would like the taxpayer to fund MPs to sue members of the Australian public for defamation.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Scott Morrison’s climate PFFT

    • Greg Foyster
    • 27 October 2021
    6 Comments

    After an excruciating few weeks of negotiations with the Nationals — and far too many hours subjected to Barnaby Joyce’s ramblings — the Morrison government has finally announced their predictably underwhelming plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Poor-blaming lets governments off the hook

    • Claire Victory
    • 26 October 2021
    7 Comments

    We don’t need further commentary that gives people who are well off yet another excuse to demonise people living in poverty and to blame them for their circumstances. It lets governments off the hook – governments which should be addressing the structural causes of poverty.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Children don’t need counselling for climate anxiety, they need climate action

    • Cristy Clark
    • 13 September 2021
    7 Comments

    It was reported recently that Coalition MPs have been calling for an expansion of the government’s school chaplaincy program in order to reduce the mental health impacts of climate change ‘activism and alarmism’ on children. Yes, that’s right, they want to address the mental health impact of activism, not the impact of the actual, visible effects of climate change itself, or the very real threat that it poses to children’s futures.

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  • 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.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Labor’s embrace of Liberal tax policies leaves poor worse off

    • Chris Smith
    • 31 August 2021
    11 Comments

    In July, Anthony Albanese announced a significant change of stance on Labor tax policy which was disappointing, if not surprising. An elected Labor government, Albanese promised, would keep the coming high income tax cuts he previously opposed. This decision to not oppose the government proposal to restructure the income tax system through reduced marginal rates is supporting a government policy that will lead to a significant redistribution of wealth towards high income earners.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth

    • John Falzon
    • 10 August 2021
    13 Comments

    When you put rising housing costs alongside stagnating wages, an alarming trend in normalising insecure work, persistent unemployment and underemployment, and statutory incomes that are going backwards in real terms, there’s good reason to be deeply worried about an increase in homelessness.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    As nuclear waste storage Bill passes, the fight continues

    • Michele Madigan
    • 26 July 2021
    15 Comments

    For several decades, successive federal governments have tried but failed to establish a national nuclear waste repository, primarily to take waste from the nuclear research reactor site operated by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at Lucas Heights, 30 km south of Sydney. Currently a site near Kimba on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula is being targeted.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The amoral world of Donald Rumsfeld

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 22 July 2021
    13 Comments

    The late Donald Rumsfeld, twice US Secretary of Defense, a Fortune 500 CEO, and congressman for three terms, did not let evidence and the firmness of facts trouble him. If he had a cause to pursue he would. Morality was merely an impediment to service.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The complexity of epidemics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 July 2021
    9 Comments

    It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.

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