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Keywords: Battlelines

  • ENVIRONMENT

    In the 'climate wars' Tony Abbott is Hiroo Onoda

    • Greg Foyster
    • 12 October 2017
    11 Comments

    The conflict has finished, but a stubborn and deluded band of stragglers, led by their belligerent General, Tony Abbott, don't want to believe it. Abbott is behaving like the infamous Imperial Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda, who refused to accept his country's surrender in 1945 and spent a further 29 years fighting phantom enemies in a remote tropical jungle.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What's next for maybe-PM Malcolm Turnbull

    • John Warhurst
    • 05 July 2016
    8 Comments

    Turnbull's most pressing decision if he is returned will be what to do with Abbott, whether to bring him back into the ministry or leave him on the backbench with the promise of a future diplomatic posting. He will need to renegotiate the Coalition agreement with the Nationals from a position of weakness and in the context of both these decisions begin to think about what to do with the big issues of climate change, asylum seekers aand same sex marriage. He must not just gird his loins for many tough battles but recognise that the battlelines have been re-set to his disadvantage.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bob Ellis the gifted troublemaker

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 April 2016
    7 Comments

    Ellis' work is a prime example of the notion advanced by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: that committed literature, and the act of writing, are political and ethical acts. Even in a film script, one can ponder social political change. Always of the left, but never formally the structured party man of faction and following, the dishevelled, sometimes wild Ellis proved contrarian even to Labor stalwarts. There were never pious reflections, or unqualified praises.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Untangling Abbott from Santamaria

    • John Warhurst
    • 01 September 2015
    18 Comments

    There is always an appetite for anything linking Tony Abbott and Bob Santamaria. The journalist in Abbott has encouraged observers to play up the links, even though it has never been entirely clear  what he is saying. He has explained that he was impressed as a young man by Santamaria’s courage as an 'advocate for unfashionable truths’, but he also pays his public dues to a number of prominent figures including John Howard, Cardinal George Pell, John Hewson, Bronwyn Bishop and even Pope Benedict XVI.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2012: Women chained to the human dairy farm

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 10 January 2013

    Women have fought the long, hard fight, marching into battle with a baby tugging on one heel and a man hanging off the other. And while the man has largely loosened his grip, the baby never will. Many women are still forced to submit, if not to patriarchy then certainly to maternal instinct. Thursday 8 March 

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  • RELIGION

    Rejection of women bishops is not terminal

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 26 November 2012
    30 Comments

    Last Saturday the Rev. Ellinah Wamukoya was ordained as bishop of Swaziland. Most eyes in Australia however were on the Church of England's General Synod, which stumbled at the threshold of a change that would have embraced the consecration of women bishops. This may prove to be the less significant story.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Women chained to the human dairy farm

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 08 March 2012
    4 Comments

    Women have fought the long, hard fight, marching into battle with a baby tugging on one heel and a man hanging off the other. And while the man has largely loosened his grip, the baby never will. Many women are still forced to submit, if not to patriarchy then certainly to maternal instinct. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Myths of wartime good and evil

    • Zac Alstin
    • 15 August 2011
    22 Comments

    It is a weakness of human nature that we forgive in our friends what we despise in our enemies. If Germany or Japan had achieved a nuclear weapon and launched it on an Allied city, our condemnation would be unrelenting.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2009: The case for Abbott as Opposition leader

    • Scott Stephens
    • 12 January 2010
    6 Comments

    Opposition presents the Liberal Party with a rare opportunity to recover its conservative soul and abandon Labor's vapid brand of politics. The only way forward is for the Party to replace Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott as its leader. August 2009

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott needs to be a better boxer

    • John Warhurst
    • 16 December 2009
    7 Comments

    Tony Abbott sees the role of the Opposition as merely to oppose the Government. This fits the image of Abbott the boxer standing his ground resolutely in the middle of the ring. But it is a simplistic view not just of Opposition, but of boxing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott's vision for a better Australia

    • Michael Mullins
    • 07 December 2009
    25 Comments

    There is a view that Tony Abbott is seeking to expand the public's moral imagination rather than simply pander to avarice. This should be tested against his characterisation of the ETS as a giant 'tax grab'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The case for Abbott as Opposition leader

    • Scott Stephens
    • 25 August 2009
    23 Comments

    Opposition presents the Liberal Party with a rare opportunity to recover its conservative soul and abandon Labor's vapid brand of politics. The only way forward is for the Party to replace Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott as its leader.

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