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Keywords: South Africa

  • RELIGION

    Women deacons: Is it time?

    • Elizabeth Young
    • 15 August 2024

      Copious research has demonstrated the historical existence of women deacons, including St Phoebe, the only person in scripture with the descriptor Deacon. So how far off is Australia from ordaining women deacons? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Justice and Hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 June 2024

    Raimond Gaita insists that there is something precious in each human being. He does not rest this conviction on a particular religious or philosophical grounding. It flows, rather, from a rich reading of human possibilities and questioning of the meaning of life.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 25 January 2024
    1 Comment

    Proving genocide is an onerous task, notably on the issue of intent. The acts alleged must be specifically intended to destroy the group members in question. The UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect considers this element ‘the most difficult element to determine.’

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    How justified is South Africa's allegation of Israeli genocide?

    • Chris Middleton
    • 24 January 2024
    6 Comments

    South Africa has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice claiming genocide has been committed against Palestinians during the Gaza conflict. As the world anticipates a preliminary verdict, we consider key questions.  

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The complicated path to saving the world

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 11 April 2023

    The government’s Powering Australia Plan promises renewable energy and net-zero emissions by 2050. However, analysts warn that there is little change in the economic and bureaucratic structures that support the fossil fuel industry. Unless Australia finds a way to prosper sustainably, the country will continue to benefit from emissions while the rest of the world suffers.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Born to rule and crowned in prison

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 July 2022
    3 Comments

    The leaders of the past are often referred to as a measuring stick for evaluating the present. Australian prime ministers are routinely compared to John Curtin or Robert Menzies. This coming week calls to mind another leader against whom we might measure others. July 18 marks Mandela Day, an annual international day in honour of  Nelson Mandela, the first Black President of South Africa. Mandela had the quality, rare today, of being born to rule.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Outgrowing apartheid: FW de Klerk

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 23 November 2021
    51 Comments

    The passing of South Africa’s last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, raises pressing questions about a complex historical character who, according to his brother, Willem de Klerk, slowly outgrew apartheid. In a critical sense, he was bound, understandably, by both time and context: race, the need to defend a racial hierarchy, the historical role of a segregationist system that saw his all-white National Party retain power for decades. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Learning from Timor-Leste’s experience for Victoria’s Yoo-rrook commission

    • Pat Walsh
    • 23 March 2021
    4 Comments

    Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling inquiry that will investigate injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation, rightly looks to similar models in South Africa and Canada. Each of these also had a clear Indigenous focus and addressed the ravaging impact of white settlement on traditional lands, cultures and communities in their respective countries.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A view from Africa of Australia burning

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 14 November 2019
    10 Comments

    As fires obliterated large swathes of Australia, I was largely oblivious to the news — though tenuously connected to events as I travelled through oven-hot, tinder-dry national parks in Southern Africa. It was only when I reached the airport in Johannesburg that the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to me.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    New law old news for Palestinian apartheid

    • Lana Tatour
    • 08 February 2019
    7 Comments

    Any suggestion that Israel is a racist and racial state is often met with outrage and accusations of antisemitism. Yet even supporters of Israel were shocked by the recent legislation of the Nation-State law. The law isn't news, however. Just like the apartheid law in South Africa, it doesn't signify the onset of apartheid; it enshrines it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fake news about 'fascist' Queen

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 November 2018
    20 Comments

    Some creative choices see Bohemian Rhapsody veer from fairytale to fake news. Displacing 'Fat Bottomed Girls' allows the filmmakers to write out the exploitative publicity stunt for that song. By skipping The Works tour, they can conveniently ignore how the band flouted the UN's cultural boycott against apartheid era South Africa.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Truths for Trump on South African farmers

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 28 August 2018
    2 Comments

    In the 17 years since, farm murders have dropped dramatically. At face value, this is a triumph in the fight against violent crime, and a resounding riposte to people like President Donald Trump and our own Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott, who have seized on the issue in order to sow racial hatred among their own constituents.

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