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Keywords: Utopia

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    New Year at the Killing Fields

    • Tony Page
    • 29 April 2014
    1 Comment

    The children go holiday wild, swarms of them drenching us with holy water. Skin soaked, we fall off our bikes, flattened by their rabble-roused blessing ... Inside it's a garden, well-kept trails between the mounds, fooling us they were designed to please the eye ... Look, that tree, so graceful — against which babies' heads were bashed ... I check for red-handed stains but they have long since dissolved into complicity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pilger's cheap shots won't ease Indigenous oppression

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 February 2014
    13 Comments

    Rabble-rousing Australian journalist John Pilger is prone to hyperbole. He refers to a 'concentration camp' located on Rottnest Island and proceeds to denounce the atrocities that occurred there. He conducts a vox pop amid flag-waving Australia Day revellers, goading them with questions about the white invasion with predictably cringe-worthy results. He may have good intentions, but he's not doing Aboriginal Australia any favours.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2013: Coalition stirs the ghost of Jimmie Blacksmith

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 January 2014
    2 Comments

    More than a century after Federation, Australia has yet to resolve this tension between a romantic notion of what 'Australia' is, and the depravities that were undertaken to attain it. It may be couched in more polite terms, but it rears its head in ham-fisted and fundamentally disrespectful approaches to Indigenous policy, such as recent moves by the Coalition Government that threaten to undercut the spirit of Native Title legislation.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Coalition stirs the ghost of Jimmie Blacksmith

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 December 2013
    5 Comments

    More than a century after Federation, Australia has yet to resolve this tension between a romantic notion of what 'Australia' is, and the depravities that were undertaken to attain it. It may be couched in more polite terms, but it rears its head in ham-fisted and fundamentally disrespectful approaches to Indigenous policy, such as recent moves by the Coalition Government that threaten to undercut the spirit of Native Title legislation.

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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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  • RELIGION

    Mabo 20 years on

    • Frank Brennan
    • 29 October 2012

    'Though land rights and self-determination provide no utopia for the contemporary indigenous Australian community, they have belatedly put right an ancient wrong. The cost and inconvenience are unavoidable. Terra nullius is no longer an option.' Full text is from Fr Frank Brennan's keynote speech at the Central Queensland Law Association Conference, Mercure Capricorn Resort, Yeppoon, 27 October 2012.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love, the Northern Territory Intervention's missing ingredient

    • Andrew Chalk
    • 11 October 2011
    5 Comments

    Many Australians have reached a point of believing that the difficulties afflicting Aboriginal communities demand the heavy handed, and often humiliating, approach. But the Philppine grassroots Gawad Kalinga model, based on 'the giving of care', offers a realistic alternative.

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  • RELIGION

    Health and equality

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 August 2011
    1 Comment

    'We need to break down the silo mentality between health, welfare and education. This exists in church agencies as much as elsewhere in society. We must be committed to providing first rate health care to our patients, but also to creating a more equal society.' Text from Frank Brennan's MercyCare Oration.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kids learning violence

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 31 March 2011
    1 Comment

    Christian defeats a bully using violence more severe than that which he suffered. He learns a frightening lesson about the capacity of violence to still conflicts. Casey Heynes, whose videoed retaliation against a school bully became a hit on YouTube, can probably relate.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    China's 'incremental' democracy

    • Mark Chou
    • 27 January 2011
    8 Comments

    Last week's media coverage of Chinese President Hu Jintao's Washington visit focused on Senator Harry Reid's offhand remarks. Reid called Hu is a 'dictator', describing his government as 'different' to that of the US. But China is on a path towards a form of democracy that may be no less democratic than many western nations.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2010: Germaine Greer's utopia

    • Jasmine-Kim Westendorf
    • 14 January 2011
    1 Comment

    Some say that not only is The Female Enuch of little relevance today: it never was relevant. Such arguments are often based more on attacks on Greer personally, and feminism generally, than considered critiques of the value of the feminist agenda set out in the book.

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  • RELIGION

    Rethinking indigeneity in the age of globalisation

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 November 2010
    3 Comments

    There is an emerging Aboriginal middle class. The contested questions in those communities relate to the expensive delivery of services including health, housing and education. The contested issue in the urban community is over self-identification as Aboriginal by persons of mixed descent.

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