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This is not a matter of holding the moral high ground but of remaining grounded. Refugee advocates should support campaigns to bring people to Australia from Nauru and Manus, but as part of a more universal and explicit commitment to respect people who seek asylum.
If governments stopped supporting low-fee non-government schools, fees would rise. This would force parents to move their children to the free government school in the same suburb, and the non-government school would become unviable. Families would be denied their school of choice, and the bill for taxpayers would be greater.
As a result of existing funding regimes the value of human beings and of human creativity comes to be identified with their social function. People are valued for their economic output, and artistic works for the size of their audience or their critical reception. No space is left for recognising any inherent value that cannot be measured.
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.
If human beings are diminished, they usually respond badly. When politicians are not engaged with shaping a better society they quarrel about slogans that are detached from larger goals, or about goals that they have abandoned in pursuit of economic purity. Then they turn on one another.
Political insiders are those forces that use economic clout, political connections, extensive networks and reliable access to decision-makers to influence political outcomes. Outsiders, by definition, lack these characteristics. The Catholic lobby now doubts its own strength and influence. The education sector is a good example.
It has become clear that the brutal Australian treatment of people who seek protection is part of an international punitive policy. This is sometimes attributed to a failure of political leadership. But it may reflect a deeper cultural change in the Western attitude to strangers, seen in migrant and refugee policy, penal policy, international relations and the scope of the rule of law.
Those of us who write regular columns have little time for introspection. We are too busy getting up the next article. But we are frequently prompted, sometimes by our disappointed readers, to ask what we are up to. Every now and then our readers deserve a personal response.
Tony Taylor's study of the funding of Australian schools from the time when Menzies first aided Catholic schools until today explains how school funding has come to pose such an intractable problem for governments. It is also a lament for so many lost opportunities to build an educational framework that would open opportunity to all.
These initiatives are sideshows, grubby and voyeuristic. They mask the simple truth: that governments have the duty to respect people as human beings and not ciphers, to provide benefits that help people to live with self-respect, to take responsibility for the disadvantage of Indigenous Australians and to involve them in its healing.
Tully is a funny film, with a serious core: a tribute to the labour of child rearing, a dissection of the substantial physical and emotional burden of this work, and a 'show-don't-tell' critique of the social norms that frequently sees that burden fall, still, primarily on women.
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.
85-96 out of 200 results.