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Keywords: Rescue

  • AUSTRALIA

    How Labor lost its moral edge

    • Tony Kevin
    • 21 July 2013
    13 Comments

    We will now tell damaged, fearful people who try to come here: Go to PNG. Wait in fever-ridden tent camps for years to be processed. We have used our economic power over a small impoverished and fairly unstable country to say to its political class: we will bribe your country to accept as future citizens groups of people who have no affinity with or respect for you, and for whom you have no affinity or respect.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Notes from a boat tragedy inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 02 July 2013
    4 Comments

    The WA Coroner's inquest into the sinking of SIEV 358 is shaping up to be the most thorough public examination ever of Australian rescue-at-sea protocols and practice in respect of assisting people on Suspected Irregular Entry Vessels. The Counsel Assisting the Coroner suggested that Australian Maritime Safety Authority's major focus for the first 11 hours of the incident had been to transfer the operation to Indonesia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia and Indonesia's deadly games of pass-the-parcel

    • Tony Kevin
    • 24 June 2013
    15 Comments

    The sinking of the asylum seeker vessel SIEV 358 encapsulates key questions as to why these tragedies too often happen at interfaces between Australia's border protection system and maritime search and rescue system, and the under-resourced Indonesian maritime search and rescue system. Hopefully next week's public inquest by the WA Coroner comes up with some answers.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Obama no 'wuss' but at what cost to Syria?

    • Evan Ellis
    • 18 June 2013
    4 Comments

    Alluding to his own military style intervention in Kosovo, Bill Clinton warned Obama not to look like a 'wuss' on Syria. Still, Obama's decision to start providing arms to Syrian rebels is an enormous risk. Australia's history of state interventions to tackle Indigenous disadvantage provide surprisingly apt criteria for evaluating the decision.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    More asylum seeker deaths, more unanswered questions

    • Tony Kevin
    • 11 June 2013
    34 Comments

    The fact that the boat was seen as stationary on Wednesday should have alerted Border Protection Command to the risk of likely engine failure. Had they reacted more quickly, the 55 or 60 drowned people may have been rescued. Instead, their boat drifted helplessly westwards, away from Christmas Island, and at some stage capsized and began to sink.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    New maritime rescue failure leaves unanswered questions

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 May 2013
    19 Comments

    On Friday, Fairfax reported on another ordeal at sea, over ten days between 27 April and 7 May. Only two people died, but the toll could easily have been far worse. The story as we know it so far raises disturbing questions about Australia’s adherence to its rescue-at-sea obligations.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Did Australian authorities do enough to try to save asylum seeker lives?

    • Tony Kevin
    • 16 April 2013
    8 Comments

    We now have another distressing and perplexing case of possible Australian failure properly to use intelligence information to save lives. If the unnamed agency that briefed AMSA did have the relevant coordinates, and yet did not pass them to AMSA to pass to BASARNAS, it could be complicit in the deaths of up to 58 people last week.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Rebuilding humanity after workplace horror

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 04 April 2013
    3 Comments

    Stéphanie loses her legs in a workplace accident. Alain is a single father who becomes her confidante. Their sexual encounters are shown to restore and affirm her dignity; they highlight the physicality of the act, particularly how Stéphanie's confidence in her own changed body flourishes through it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Christmas Island capsize demands coronial inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 March 2013
    39 Comments

    The details of the event as so far publicly known suggest seriously life-threatening negligent process. No one would have died if this unnecessary and, on the face if it, unprofessional halt and boarding had not taken place. No amount of blaming the asylum seekers' poor seamanship can get around that fact.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Oscar-winning racism in Hollywood's mixed bag

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 28 February 2013

    After cataloguing the ways in which the film belittles and marginalises the experiences of black slaves, Williams laments the fact that such marginalisation continues to exist seemingly unnoticed in mainstream popular culture. The Oscar awarded to Django Unchained is the epitome of popular culture 'not noticing'.

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  • RELIGION

    The Church is not beyond reproach

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 November 2012
    1 Comment

    'Might not the chief problem with Church language in the public square be that we tend to come from a position of moral superiority, approaching those dreadfully compromised politicians who will do anything to be elected? The abuse crisis reminds us that the Church is not irreproachable.' Text from Fr Frank Brennan's presentation at the Anglican Church of Australia's Public Affairs Commission Conference, November 2012.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why the old woman couldn't cross the road

    • Mary Manning
    • 21 November 2012

    What was she to do? Mr J. J. Bullfinch would surely rescue her if he knew of her plight. He would stride out into the traffic and it would stop when he raised his hand. But why should she imagine he'd come? He hardly knew her. She was alone, sitting on the grass shaking from the shock of being nearly hit by a bus. 

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