Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Section: Australia

  • AUSTRALIA

    Does the 'Let it Rip' approach have a eugenics problem?

    • Justin Glyn
    • 27 January 2022
    10 Comments

    In the early part of the twentieth century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) used the latter’s work to argue that human breeding stock could be improved. He would weed out the weakest and the less able and produce a sturdier race. Until recently, the crematoria of Hitler’s death camps were enough to remind most that this was not an idea consonant with actual human flourishing.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The case for basic, public values

    • Greg Craven
    • 25 January 2022
    42 Comments

    One reasonably could ask whether this is the moment to write a book about the potential of Catholic Social Theory to contribute to Australian politics and policy. After all, the Church is still struggling to come to terms with decades of child abuse, hardly a recommendation for social potential. We currently also are attempting to make sense of a Plenary that is both confused and confusing.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    On remembering the First Fleet

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 January 2022
    19 Comments

    In recent years, Australia Day has been a holiday without title. It has been marketed as a day for all Australians, but is held on a date is seen increasingly as the beginning of the dispossession and humiliation of the First Australians. As a result it is generally received as an opportunity to laze around undisturbed by serious thoughts about Australia.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    All that is solid melts into air

    • John Falzon
    • 20 January 2022
    5 Comments

    Social security payments were once seen as a means of preventing poverty, not prescribing it. A job was once seen, at least for some, as being not only the best guarantee against poverty but the path to economic security. Now it seems, however, multiple jobs are required to stave off poverty.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    United by our national scapegoat

    • Joel Hodge
    • 20 January 2022
    14 Comments

    It is unusual when political enemies unite. We should take note of them. The spectacular deportation of Australian Open tennis champion, Novak Djokovic, is one such unusual moment. Feeling had risen to a mob-like fervour. One is left wondering why?

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Incarceration in a changing climate

    • Julie Edwards
    • 18 January 2022
    2 Comments

    The images are simultaneously striking and terrifying. A raging grassfire that is shooting flames into the sky and destroying nature around it and lapping perilously close to the fences around Central NSW’s Lithgow Correctional Centre. As local residents were evacuated and highways were closed to protect public safety when the fire raged out of control just before Christmas in 2019, 400 prisoners remained detained.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2021: Religious discrimination laws coming to the boil

    • Frank Brennan
    • 11 January 2022

    It’s four years since the Australian Parliament amended the Marriage Act 1961 to provide that marriage means ‘the union of two people to the exclusion of all others’. The legislation followed the plebiscite on same sex marriage. To address the concerns of some religious groups, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull set up an expert panel chaired by long time Liberal Party minister Philip Ruddock to report on whether Australian law adequately protected the human right to freedom of religion. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    There will be a next time. We must do better.

    • Cristy Clark
    • 16 December 2021

    Under Victoria’s Border Directions after 23 July, people in NSW, including Victorian residents, were effectively prevented from entering the state. Their only option was to request an exemption for a number of specified reasons including ‘attending a funeral or end of life event or returning home for health, wellbeing, care or compassionate reasons or for any other reason under a general discretion’.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    A tale of two webs: A strengths-based approach to place-based disadvantage

    • Sally Cowling
    • 14 December 2021

    In developing an understanding of place-based disadvantage, shame and stigma are transmitted between generations within the small number of communities we collectively fail. And yet no matter the number of indicators of place-based disadvantage, each community possesses some unique strengths. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The ones who came with chains

    • Brian McCoy
    • 14 December 2021

    I don’t write to State Premiers very often. However, a month ago I did. It was to the Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan. It was not about Test cricket, the Juukan Gorge or opening the state’s borders. It was in relation to a photo on the front page of The Australian on the weekend of the 6/7 November showing an Aboriginal man in Western Australia boarding a plane under arrest. He was barefooted and with both a wrist and ankle chain.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    How community interventions can prevent youth crime

    • Ross Homel
    • 09 December 2021
    2 Comments

    A small minority of localities situated outside Greater Brisbane suffer from disproportionately high rates of a wide array of problems including low income, overcrowding, long-term unemployment, particulate matter in the air, no internet, child maltreatment, and youth crime. These different strands of disadvantage pile-up and interlock, countering attempts to break free.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The first sign of corruption

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 December 2021
    9 Comments

    Corruption in society is a sign that respect for human dignity has been eroded. If we identify the value of human beings with their ability to compete, we are easily led to treat other people and groups in society as instruments to be used for our own gain. The result is that the integrity of public institutions and people’s trust in them are eaten away.

    READ MORE