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Section: Australia

  • AUSTRALIA

    Government blasé on Australian drone deaths

    • Justin Glyn
    • 27 May 2014
    13 Comments

    While recent weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget's disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked. It goes to the heart of democracy, revealing not only the distance between Western governments and their citizens, but also the acceptance of that gulf as a fact of modern political life.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Letting Australian industry die promotes workplace slavery elsewhere

    • Michael Mullins
    • 26 May 2014
    9 Comments

    The Australian Government needs to be less cavalier and reticent to subsidise local manufacturers, who are obliged to be transparent about their work practices and bear the costs of this. When our politicians praise workplace efficiency in other countries, they are promoting manufacturing processes that often exploit workers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia slips in generosity ranking

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 23 May 2014
    6 Comments

    Last week the Federal Government committed to a much smaller and 'just in our neighbourhood' aid program for the long term. This major shift sent a perplexing signal to the world, with Australia abandoning Africa's poorest at a time when Australian mining investment in Africa continues to boom.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Waiting room blues

    • Brian Matthews
    • 23 May 2014
    6 Comments

    In the specialist’s waiting room, I usually while away the hours with quality BYO literary fare. But one day I had left my book in the car, and I searched the reading rack for reading matter on subjects more interesting than the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Australian holiday. Succumbing at last to extreme boredom I got up, slid Soap World from under its ragtag competitors, and all was revealed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget makes asylum seeker vilification official

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 22 May 2014
    26 Comments

    The Government's vilification of people arriving by boat has reached the level where the term 'illegal' features in the Budget documents. Immigration Minister Morrison has insisted on referring to people arriving by boat as 'illegals' for some years, despite the Migration Act using the less pejorative term 'unlawful non-citizen'. This is not just a lawyer's linguistic debate; if it were not important, the Government would not insist on the term.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love creates space for restorative justice

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 May 2014
    12 Comments

    For the good of victims and the community prisoners need to find the space in which they can feel remorse for the harm they have done, reflect on and change the patterns of life that contributed to the crime, and come to act accountably. To include love in penal justice may seem impossible. But recently in court a man was sentenced to jail for dangerous driving that led to the death of a young woman. Her father then embraced the driver.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Let's be good neighbours with Timor

    • Frank Brennan
    • 21 May 2014
    10 Comments

    In 2006 Australia and Timor Leste hastily signed the Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) at a time of considerable political instability in Timor. After last year's revelation of evidence of Australian spying on the Timorese during the negotiation of CMATS, the Timorese decided to challenge its validity, and in March this year they had a spectacular win in the International Court of Justice that caused great embarrassment to Australia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Moral teaching that falls on deaf ears

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 21 May 2014
    21 Comments

    At a time when we are preoccupied with the shock and immorality of the budget, the Australian Catholic Bishops issue a direct and forceful challenge to current government policy. 'The time has come to examine our conscience.' But it seems no-one is listening.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget points to new sectarianism

    • Michael Mullins
    • 19 May 2014
    6 Comments

    When Tony Abbott reintroduced knights and dames back in March, critics said it was a sign he was 'stuck in the 1950s'. Another characteristic of 1950s Australian society was the sectarianism that bitterly divided the nation along religious lines. There are echoes of this in last Tuesday's Federal Budget announcement that schools will lose the option of appointing non-religious welfare workers under the national school chaplaincy program.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bill Shorten's WorkChoices moment

    • Fatima Measham
    • 19 May 2014
    16 Comments

    Notwithstanding Kevin Rudd's merit as a candidate, there is no doubt that the unions-led campaign against WorkChoices was pivotal to handing government to Labor. What Bill Shorten has been handed this week in the Federal Budget is several WorkChoices with which to galvanise people. He needed it. His Budget reply offered a glimpse of the sort of Opposition Leader that Australians deserve.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Cruelled by the Budget

    • John Falzon
    • 15 May 2014
    4 Comments

    'You don't help young people, or older people, or people with disabilities, or single mums, into jobs by making them poor. You don't build people up by putting them down. And as even the OECD acknowledges, you don't build a strong economy by increasing the level of inequality. You don't create a strong country on the backs of the already poor.' Statement by John Falzon

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Whose rule book is Abbott playing from?

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 15 May 2014
    48 Comments

    It took John Howard until his third term before he let his personal leanings completely off the leash. It led to his electoral demise. Abbott is doing much the same in his first term, over-reaching, thinking himself invulnerable to a political backlash. Whereas Machiavelli's prince could rule through force, Abbott must face an electorate whose trust in political promises has been completely eroded. Our political system will take a long time to recover.

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