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Section: Australia

  • AUSTRALIA

    Police email scandal can't dampen Indian hospitality

    • Vinay Verma
    • 12 October 2010
    11 Comments

    The Victoria Police 'electrocution email' scandal has again displayed Australian inhospitality to the world.  Despite this, Indian hospitality remains steadfast. The guest is God in an Indian household. Australia's athletes would know this hospitality well.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's feminist saint

    • Michael Mullins
    • 11 October 2010
    5 Comments

    Sexual abuse was part of the mix of challenges facing Mary MacKillop and her sisters, but it was only one of many elements of disfunction within the Church and society of the time. Historian Father Ed Campion has described MacKillop as 'a heroine to modern Australian feminists'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Commission flats fable

    • Virginia Millen
    • 05 October 2010
    10 Comments

    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

    Lists worth being on

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 October 2010
    6 Comments

    Last week the BRW Young Rich List appeared. Judging by the profiles that go with lists, listed people are a boring lot. They tend to take seriously activities that don't contribute much to human happiness. Many of the wealthy young made nothing, except a pile of money through property and hedge funds.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Life and art in jail

    • Oliver Humphries
    • 01 October 2010
    11 Comments

    I am the unwilling custodian of some very fine paintings that no one will ever see. Whenever Mr N wants to discuss aesthetics, or Matisse's brush technique, or surrealism, I have to remind myself that he killed his wife and step-daughter with a fruit knife.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rehabilitating Rudd and Turnbull

    • John Warhurst
    • 27 September 2010
    6 Comments

    Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull's past faults and misdemeanours have been forgotten and they have been charged with new responsibilities at the heart of Australia's domestic and international futures. The new leaders must wish their vanquished colleagues great success. But not too much.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Confessions of a football feral

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 September 2010
    9 Comments

    I am a Magpies supporter, although I've always liked to think I'm not one of those Magpies supporters: the mythical 'ferals' that give every non-Magpies supporter slagging rights — no, I'm not one of them. Recently though, I had cause to wonder.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pope-hate in broken Britain

    • Michael Mullins
    • 20 September 2010
    12 Comments

    Social commentator Frank Furedi wrote that the Pope's UK visit provided Britain's cultural elite with 'a figure that it is okay to hate'. We might regard the angst as a manifestation of the growing pains that are to be expected in a world of emerging pluralism.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Beating up on football thuggery

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 20 September 2010
    11 Comments

    Police look on benignly; clergymen bless them; politicians turn up to watch. But can any activity where players set out to damage their opponents be called a sport? And should such an activity be allowed to draw on the country's medical resources to mend that damage?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pork-barrel politics rolls regional Australia

    • Michael Mullins
    • 13 September 2010
    5 Comments

    Deals struck between Prime Minister Gillard and Independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott saw hospitals in their electorates receive preferential treatment ahead of regions with greater needs. Pork-barrelling has always been part of politics, but that does not make it any less of a scandal.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope for a stitched-up government

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 September 2010
    12 Comments

    Many of us will wish the new government well, but refrain from putting our own money on its survival. Hopefully our two major parties, which were so happy to do whatever it took to win, no matter what the cost to human lives and ethical values, will recover a deeper sense of what matters. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Welcome back Julia, now do it differently

    • Moira Rayner
    • 08 September 2010
    22 Comments

    Three Independents, belittled as 'The Three Amigos' but riding into the sunset nonetheless, have won the trust of their electorates and been able to exercise a little, meaningful power about how Parliament should work. This may not last, now that the decision has been announced.

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