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Section: Australia

  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian politics could use a dash of vitriol

    • Edwina Byrne
    • 20 January 2011
    16 Comments

    The speeches of the Tea Party movement, for all their faults, are notable for their vivid symbolism and appeal to values. When was the last time you heard an Australian politician invent their own intelligible metaphor?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gillard, Bligh and leadership in a crisis

    • Moira Rayner
    • 18 January 2011
    22 Comments

    I am bloody tired of journalists comparing one woman against another, as if there were a competition to find the 'real' woman leader, a winner and losers. That isn't how women tend to use power: it can be shared, and used for the common good. We saw Bligh and Gillard doing it, and didn't get it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Addicted to disaster porn

    • Michael Mullins
    • 17 January 2011
    10 Comments

    Durng the past week, we've been treated to wall to wall television coverage of the Brisbane and Queensland floods. Some would argue that television, and indeed the media in general, is all about fulfilling the human need for gratification, prurient or otherwise. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Diary from the eye of the flood

    • Susan Prior
    • 17 January 2011
    12 Comments

    According to predictions based on earlier floods the ground floor of my house was was going to be inundated, so all our worldies were brought upstairs. We waited. It rained. Then on Tuesday morning something interesting started to happen.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Other unsung Indigenous heroes

    • Myrna Tonkinson
    • 14 January 2011

    Not yet 40, she must live in Perth, hundreds of kilometres from home, to receive dialysis. She is currently in hospital recovering from spinal surgery, and so is separated even from her city-based loved ones. Yet she appears always with a beaming smile.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Commission flats fable

    • Virginia Millen
    • 12 January 2011

    He had the emaciated cheeks of an addict. She was smaller, toothless and aged beyond her years. As we closed our gate he struck her. She fell on the bitumen, lit by the headlight of a passing car. 'You touch her and I'll belt you too,' the man yelled to my partner.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Tony Abbott's missing moral core

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 11 January 2011
    18 Comments

    Tony Abbott has been in public life for a long time. Most recently there has been his meteoric rise to leadership of the Liberal party and to a hair’s breadth from the prime ministership itself. Charming and disarming as he can be, there is something deeply disturbing in the way he carries out his public role.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Gillard's win a loss for feminists

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 10 January 2011
    3 Comments

    Rudd's eviction should strike fear into the hearts of feminists everywhere. For this is how the Labor Government operates, unsheathing the swords, wrenching power, cutting down a leader before he has had time to really prove himself. Imagine what it will do when that leader is a woman.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Don't shoot the messenger, award him the Nobel Peace Prize

    • Michael Mullins
    • 10 January 2011
    2 Comments

    The character flaws of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are being exaggerated in order to shift the burden of shame from embarrassed governments on to Assange himself. We need to be told why it's in the public interest to hide the undermining of the international cluster bombs ban by the British Foreign Office.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Don't wimp out at the ballot box

    • Edwina Byrne
    • 07 January 2011
    5 Comments

    It would be easy to cast a donkey vote or a vote for a minor party and to thus wash your hands of the responsibility for our governance for the next three or so years. In a representative democracy, a vacuous election represents a lazy polity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Vote 1 bus 'bludger'

    • Sarah Burnside
    • 07 January 2011
    2 Comments

    'This election', says Tony Abbott, 'is about you.' Recently, passengers on a Perth bus found themselves involved in an impromptu social experiment. 'This guy has no money and tried to give me a ticket that's two days old,' the bus driver said, 'What do you reckon? Should I let him on?'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why we lost the Ashes: it’s politics, stupid

    • John Honner
    • 07 January 2011
    3 Comments

    The fortunes of the English and Australian cricket teams follow the fortunes of their nations' conservative governments.

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