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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
As a social and political activist since my teens, people ask me what motivated me early on. A few factors shaped my values, including my Irish Catholic background and my public housing upbringing by a widowed mother on welfare. But it was a rock song that brought it all together. 'Someone lied,' it declares: 'Genocide.'
Paul Keating this month reflected on his determination as Prime Minister 'to establish a new and durable' relationship with Indonesia' and lamented the Australian media and his predecessors' preoccupation with human rights abuses in East Timor. It'd be churlish to question these reflections if the current Foreign Minister were not on the cusp of making a similar mistake regarding Papua.
Two principal conclusions can be drawn from the East Timor experience. First, a victim-friendly process is desirable, achievable and productive. If East Timor after decades of war and devastation could do it, Australia certainly can. But victims should not take for granted that the high level of public and political support the Royal Commission currently enjoys will translate into action.
The world was silent when Jewish people suffered incursions and massacres and the 'final solution' in death camps. A vast number of my own family were murdered during this time. Now the boot is on the other foot. Israel holds the position of power in the Gaza conflict, yet the world is largely silent about its atrocities.
The post-war migration policy favoured single men as labour for the burgeoning heavy industries. By the mid-1950s thousands of lonely male migrants populated the cities, and many local women found them threatening. Like those women, Slutwalk participants defend their right to walk the streets wearing what they want without being harassed.
The draft senior secondary history curriculum glosses over Australia's relationship with East Timor. It needs to go beyond the false media and political view that Australia's involvement in East Timor has been unremittingly courageous, generous and exemplary. There is a danger that students will believe Australian soldiers went into Portuguese Timor in 1941 'to protect the Timorese' and that Australia 'saved' East Timor in 1999.
Meetings between holiness and politics are inherently dramatic. Think of Jesus' trial, of A'Beckett's murder, of Luther at Worms, of Romero's last sermon. These were tragedies. In Fr Pierre Ceyrac, a French Jesuit priest who died last week, politics and holiness met dramatically, but as comedy.
With East Timor marking ten years of independence on Sunday, it is relevant to ask which nation in particular it is celebrating independence from. In one sense East Timorese value independence because it is a reminder that they do not hold ties and obligations to Australia, which might have become their neo-colonial master.
The publication of photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghani insurgents has provoked a lively exchange of opinion in the media. Just as in Afghanistan, American and Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese saw themselves pitted against an opponent who acted by a different — inhuman — set of rules.
The famine of 1977–79 cut a swathe through East Timor's civilian population. Having failed to subdue the Timorese, the Indonesian military opted to starve them out. Details from that little-understood period are contained in cables that Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has blocked from public access.
A subtle effect of dismissal regulation is that it penalises workers who are risky for employers, such as those returning to work after a break to rear children, those with a disability, or from particular racial groups. The most vulnerable in the labour market miss out as employers lean towards 'safe' workers.
No one has been held accountable for the human rights abuses that occurred in East Timor, and this has resulted in a further vacuum of human responsibility in West Papua. The Australian Government has neglected the situation, but so too have the churches.
121-132 out of 200 results.