keywords: John Warhurst

  • CONTRIBUTORS

    John Warhurst

    • John Warhurst

    John Warhurst AO is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University in Canberra where he was Professor of Political Science from 1993-2008. Before that he was Professor of Politics at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, from 1985-1993. He has been a weekly columnist for The Canberra Times since 1998. He also writes occasionally for The Footy Almanac. He has been chair of the Australian Republican Movement (2002-2005), campaigning for an Australian Head of State for Australia, and Deputy Chair of Catholic Social Services Australia (2007-2012), the church's peak body for social services. In 2009 he was made an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO) for services to political science and to the community.

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  • RELIGION

    Susan Ryan, John Fahey and the Catholic story

    • John Warhurst
    • 08 October 2020
    39 Comments

    Recent weeks have seen the deaths of former NSW Liberal Premier and federal Finance minister, John Fahey, and former Labor federal minister, Senator Susan Ryan. They were both exemplary public figures who not only made a major contribution to Australian public life but did so in a way that drew praise from all sides of politics.  

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  • RELIGION

    A skeleton for the Plenary Council agenda

    • John Warhurst
    • 25 March 2021
    45 Comments

    Continuing the Journey, the working document (or instrumentum laboris), is another stepping stone towards the Plenary Council (PC). How you view this document, provided explicitly both to those few hundred called to be PC participants and to the whole Catholic community, depends very much on your expectations.

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  • RELIGION

    The Plenary Council must address structural inertia and church decline

    • John Warhurst
    • 25 February 2021
    55 Comments

    Two documents from and about the church in Australia issued in December last year should be compulsory reading for all Plenary Council (PC) delegates. They offer crucial insights into the state of the church in Australia, and taken together they paint a picture of church inertia and decline.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Spirituality, leadership and social service in the church

    • John Warhurst
    • 15 December 2020
    6 Comments

    The work of Catholic social service agencies should be celebrated within the church. Its peak body, Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA), which has been savagely cut recently, has successfully matched wits with governments for over sixty years and its member agencies continue to serve the community selflessly.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Parallels between the military and the church

    • John Warhurst
    • 01 December 2020
    31 Comments

    The Australian community and its government are struggling to come to terms with the extremely serious allegations against members of the SAS for their alleged criminal misconduct during the war in Afghanistan. At the same time, we Catholics are experiencing a bad case of déjà as there are many echoes of how we felt when the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RC) began in 2013.

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  • MEDIA

    Media matters for the good of the Church

    • Peter Donnan
    • 19 November 2020
    66 Comments

    Author Gideon Goosen estimates the percentage of those involved in reform groups in Australia is 5 per cent or less. Given the passivity of the laity, his view is that reform proponents should seek to engage the 40 to 45 per cent who might change their thinking. What forums or media, with sufficient audience reach and influence, facilitate respectful discussion of change in the Catholic Church?

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  • RELIGION

    Patchwork quilt church inhibits national action

    • John Warhurst
    • 05 November 2020
    67 Comments

    There is a good reason why the term Australian Catholic Church is frowned upon in official circles. It does not exist. Instead, it is a patchwork quilt of fiefdoms called dioceses. It lacks an energising central authority which, when it needs to, can generate and shape a national church response.

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  • RELIGION

    Factions and ginger groups within the church

    • John Warhurst
    • 10 September 2020
    66 Comments

    What is happening at the moment is that certain bishops are condemning members of the church renewal movement as pressure groups pushing an agenda, while ignoring the well-known fact that groups with other agendas are widespread within the church.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Accountability, responsibility and the blame game

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 August 2020
    7 Comments

    I would like here to reflect on the relationship between accountability and other essential aspects of public life: reflection, responsibility, and praise or blame with their attendant punishment and reward. The order and priorities within these need to be respected both in government action and in public comment.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Accounting for accountability

    • John Warhurst
    • 13 August 2020
    6 Comments

    Many in the community are crying out for accountability. The idea is appealing because it sounds like a simple framework, but in practice it is extremely difficult to apply.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Respecting Arts and Humanities in universities

    • John Warhurst
    • 16 July 2020
    11 Comments

    Government attitudes towards universities, the humanities and the arts, are often a strange mixture of ignorance, blindness and misplaced priorities. It is almost as if their graduates fail to match the image of what the government would prefer Australians to be.

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