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Keywords: King Lear

  • RELIGION

    Cardinals meeting consultative Pope

    • Brian Lucas
    • 01 October 2013
    14 Comments

    As a specially selected group of cardinals prepares to meet with Pope Francis, there is eagerness among the world's press for access to the meeting and clear expectations of radical shifts in church policy. Some have tried to hose such hopes down. Yet the cardinals have a unique opportunity and a serious responsibility to help Francis understand what the people of God are thinking and expecting.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Politicising the bimbo

    • Ellena Savage
    • 27 September 2013
    6 Comments

    The pleasure of not affecting one's native mode of speech to appease a kind of person who means to privilege the privileged, is unparalleled. Try speaking in a playful way to someone who's scared of bimbos, and then watch their brains literally explode. When a listener struggles to understand that when I say I 'literally died', and yet clearly am still alive, that I am using language in a playful and even ironic way, it's not really their fault. 

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  • EDUCATION

    Universities are changing, not dying

    • Jessica McLean
    • 23 September 2013
    4 Comments

    The 'renewal' of Sydney University's Fisher Library has raised eyebrows, with books removed to storage to make way for 'hot desking chill zones and break out areas'. Universities Australia found in 2013 that 88 per cent of survey respondents encourage their children to attend universities. This large pool of students requires educators to accommodate diverse learning needs, and do more than just set essays to assess learning.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    My election campaign hibernation

    • Frank Brennan
    • 04 September 2013
    25 Comments

    Over a meal with church members and local party officials in a small village outside Xian in China, a local asks after Lù Kèwén (Kevin Rudd). He had heard that Mr Murdoch was being very tough on him! This unsurprisingly is the only mention of Australian politics the whole week. But they were surprised to learn that yet again Australia was likely to lose its only Mandarin speaking PM. They have no idea of the alternatives.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Blowing up the people smugglers

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 15 August 2013
    2 Comments

    As social commentary Elysium clearly has in mind any country that receives 'unwanted' arrivals of refugees. But it seems particularly timely in Australia, where the political response to asylum seekers who arrive by boat is simply to stop them. The response by the fictional bureaucrat Delacourt, to blow the smugglers' ships out of the air before they reach Elysium, certainly takes the 'stop the boats' mentality to its extreme.

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  • MEDIA

    Election coverage you can trust

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 06 August 2013
    15 Comments

    One of the things we expect from our media is that they will ask the hard questions on an election trail. Today's editorial from the Daily Telegraph makes it clear that they believe only one party is worthy of your trust. If the mainstream media can no longer be trusted to ask the serious questions of both parties, perhaps it's time for the game to move elsewhere.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rudd's boats blunder is shocking, awful

    • Frank Brennan
    • 05 August 2013
    8 Comments

    Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia, with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There's only one thing worse than shock and awe; that's shock and awe that doesn't work because you haven't done your homework.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Spare a thought for luckless Gillard

    • Moira Rayner
    • 27 June 2013
    37 Comments

    Anyone who knows how it feels to lose a career in mid life will understand how Gillard is feeling today. Now that a most gracious acknowledgement of personal defeat has been given by the first woman to step up to the hardest political job anyone could be asked to do, we must find the time to consider and learn from what we have witnessed about how the country is run.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Talking the talk with Aboriginal students

    • Mike Bowden
    • 17 June 2013
    9 Comments

    Ted didn't need a translator. He spoke Kriol fluently having spent many years working with Aboriginal people across the Territory. The locals smiled and visibly opened to him, clearly honoured by his effort to meet with them in their country on the basis of equality and respect. Learning the vernacular, and learning through the vernacular, establishes in students a sense of pride and power.

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  • RELIGION

    Malaysia Solution is dead in the water

    • Frank Brennan
    • 19 April 2013
    11 Comments

    It is time for each side of politics to stop blaming the other for the increasing wave of boats and for Gillard to cease invoking the unreal prospect of a revised Malaysia Solution. A revised arrangement consistent with the recommendations of the Expert Panel is an impossibility before the election.

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  • RELIGION

    Using poor language in the liturgy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 January 2013
    109 Comments

    One year on from the introduction of the New Mass Translation it is clear that the more dramatic hopes and fears were not realised. There were no reports of widespread rebellion in the pews, but nor has there been the great spiritual renewal that some promised. The language of the new translation is simply not grounded.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Tony Abbott's monsters

    • Michael Mullins
    • 24 September 2012
    35 Comments

    The Federal Coalition has taken to making monsters of its own MPs in the hope that their larger than life profiles will translate into electoral success. But with the Cory Bernardi gay marriage bestiality debacle, Tony Abbott might have finally learned the lesson of Mary Shelley's morality tale Frankenstein.

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