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How can we make progress on the question of whether debate can do harm, and if it can, whether that’s a sufficient reason to suppress particular debates? Or should we adopt a ‘no debate!’ approach to particular topics ourselves?
With very little public debate or consultation, Victoria has repealed almost all laws relating to prostitution. Alone among all recreational activities, sex for payment is now unrestricted, even regarding health and safety. If we really care what happens to people, what place does sex work have in our society?
The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified clericalism as a significant contributor to abuse across religious institutions Australia-wide. Clericalism is rooted in a theological belief that the clergy are different to the laity, having undergone an ‘ontological change’ at ordination, and feeds the notion that the clergy may not be challenged. And according to the report, the culture of clericalism is on the rise in seminaries in Australia.
It is no coincidence that white ‘settler’ theology in this country has barely begun to engage with Indigenous people. Arguably, it has only begun to do so because the Indigenous citizens of the churches have begun to cast off the imaginative shackles made for us by our white gubbas and find our own voice.
The discussion in Australia as to how such atrocities are to be approached is telling. The call for responsibility has varied by degrees. Most tend to some variant of the rotten apple theory: a few particularly fruits that may be isolated and extruded from the barrel. Culpability can thereby be confined, preserving the integrity of other military personnel and, importantly, political decision makers.
It may have taken five years but in the last session of the recently completed Senate Inquiry, finally a government department bureaucrat has used the phrase — '…it is a national issue.' Well certainly — 'When it suits,' one might respond.
Two recent stories in the Australian attack Murdoch University academics who supposedly described Anzacs as 'killers' and detainees on Manus Island as 'prisoners'. The stories display a poor understanding of the academic role, and the nature of 'critique', which is not to merely to present all arguments as if they had equal merit.
The show trial of Archbishop Philip Wilson has backfired badly causing hurt to many people, most especially victims of child sexual abuse who thought the law was being rightly applied to put an errant Catholic bishop in the frame. Section 316 of the New South Wales Crimes Act is a dead letter and it causes nothing but trouble to everyone involved.
We had some books at home so I wasn't wholly deprived but I did have to discover reading without any real parental guidance; English wasn't even our home language. But when I started working at my local public library, it became clear that while I might have been the child of refugees, for many, libraries themselves were a refuge.
Brian De Palma's Redacted took as its grim inspiration the true account of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, and the murder of her family, by a wayward group of US troops in 2006. It plays pretty fast and loose with the facts.