Keywords: A Secret Australia
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AUSTRALIA
As next week's 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon approaches, the Australian Government has found its own egregious way to commemorate the anniversary. On Friday, the West Australian reported that HMAS Choules was standing off the Vietnamese coast, in an operation to hand back to Vietnam a group of almost 50 asylum seekers. So soon after Malcolm Fraser's passing.
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RELIGION
- Paul Collins
- 11 November 2014
23 Comments
An important power shift occurred in Rome at the weekend, and it has a genuine Australian connection. The nuncio in Canberra Archbishop Paul Gallagher was named Secretary for Relations with States, which will put him third in charge at the Vatican. He has been popular here because he has kept in touch with pastoral life, having volunteered to help out in the far-flung western NSW of Diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes during his first Easter in Australia.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 22 October 2014
47 Comments
Reviewing Cardinal Pell's evidence to the Royal Commission in August, I have concluded that Catholics need to accept moral responsibility and legal liability for all child sexual abuse committed by clergy prior to 1996, regardless of what might be the moral or legal position after 1996 when improved measures for supervision and dismissal of errant clergy were put in place.
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ECONOMICS
- Brian Toohey
- 10 October 2014
7 Comments
Suppressing information can actually damage national security. President Kennedy intervened to get the New York Times to withhold sensitive details from a report about the imminent invasion of Cuba by CIA sponsored exiles in April 1961. Times executives said Kennedy later told them, 'If you had printed more about the [CIA] operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.'
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 July 2014
14 Comments
My response to government reports is often like that of a small boy watching a magician. You know that a rabbit will be produced out of the hat, but you can’t quite work out how it will be done. For a Government set on cutting costs the McClure report into Australia's welfare system will be easy to cherry pick by further depriving the already deprived. The risk is that it will not pull a white rabbit out of the hat, but a ferret.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 04 July 2014
2 Comments
This was akin to reading a carefully vetted resume. An intelligent and formidable first lady, senator and Secretary of State, and no shrinking violet, the author presents a largely passionless, desiccated record. There's the odd poignant reflection. Absurd depictions of Mel Brooksian secure rooms (and the reading of documents with a blanket over her head in non-secure rooms). But, overall, Clinton draws pictures without drawing blood.
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INTERNATIONAL
- James O'Brien
- 02 July 2014
6 Comments
FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 is in the knockout stages. Brazil’s team is through to the quarter finals, much to the joy and delight of home fans. Yet to what extent can Brazilians actually celebrate? The tournament has come at much social and economic cost.
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AUSTRALIA
- Fatima Measham
- 13 June 2014
5 Comments
As I take in the submissions presented to the Senate inquiry into the Manus Island riots, I am reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In it, nearly the entire town knew of Santiago Nasar's impending death; his assassins had made a point of divulging their intent to everyone they met over the course of the day. The prevailing impression from the Senate inquiry is one of similar inevitability and complicity.
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AUSTRALIA
The Budget was one of most vicious attacks on ordinary people that we have seen in recent Australian history. We are not in the throes of a fiscal crisis but if we embark on this treacherous path we will be staring down the barrel of a social crisis. But we have a secret weapon. It is called solidarity. Even though we name it openly and proudly, it remains a secret weapon because those who do not practise it can never understand it.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Given last week's unequivocal iteration of the dire state of Australian politics, perhaps we've earned the right to a bit of escapism. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty proves adept at turning the warm-and-fuzzies up to 11. Still there's no escaping the sense that Walter's ability to jet around the world in order to find himself is implicitly an expression of affluent, white male privilege.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
The Double proffers a nightmare vision in which the human spirit is no match for the corrupt and corrupting power of a society obsessed with productivity and material achievement. In a week where we have seen an Australian Budget that gives favour to economic rationalism and the wellbeing of the wealthy, over that of some of our society's most needy citizens, such cynicism resonates powerfully. That is a tragedy.
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AUSTRALIA
I was 13 when he went to Vietnam. There was a kind of perverse status to be derived from having a brother called up for national service, and for him to head north of the equator was a further plus. When I participated in a Moratorium March it remained my secret. What did he see over there? What did he manage to forget over his subsequent 34 years? We'll never know because he never said. And he never participated in Anzac Day.
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