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Keywords: Actu

  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian democracy needs an intrusion of the excluded

    • John Falzon
    • 19 August 2013
    24 Comments

    Kevin Rudd says we need a 'new politics' or a 'new way'. Tony Abbott says we'll only get a new way by electing a new government. What is missing in both statements is the recognition that what we actually need is a new kind of economic democracy: a reconfiguration of our economic prioritising away from individualism towards the common good, and towards the participation of all rather than the exclusion of many.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A legal tax rort is still a rort

    • Michael Mullins
    • 22 July 2013
    11 Comments

    The salary packaging and car manufacturing industries resented not being consulted about changes to fringe benefits tax rules. But as treasurer Chris Bowen said when he shrugged off the criticism: 'This is a matter of the integrity of the tax system.' A tax system that makes compromises with sectional interests is by definition corrupt and turning its back on the common good that it has been set up to serve.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The alchemy of Australia's personality politics

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 July 2013
    9 Comments

    Voters find it difficult to buy ideas wholesale when they don't make sense in retail. Imagine a voter who would like to see the Labor Party build on reforms in education and health but cannot abide its policy on asylum seekers. This is where the focus on personalities actually matters. Much of the dissatisfaction with leaders ultimately rests on a public assessment of the way policies are prosecuted.

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  • RELIGION

    Good and evil faces of child labour

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 June 2013
    6 Comments

    I met a young woman who had been sold as a domestic servant when she was five, and later on-sold for sex work in Bangkok, Malaysia and Australia. I also met a girl in a village of El Salvador: for generations her family had lived by making rope from cactus fibre. Her work contributed substantially to the family income and made her a valued member of her society.

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  • CARTOON

    Credit where it's due

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 03 April 2013

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2012: If Clive Palmer was a High Court judge

    • Patrick McCabe
    • 11 January 2013
    2 Comments

    Imagine Attorney-General Nicola Roxon appoints Palmer as the newest High Court judge. Justice Palmer sets about rewriting the law in radical ways, freeing mining companies from regulation and approving disbanding the Australian Greens. Surely such an appointment could be challenged? Actually, no. Monday 21 May 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Practical solutions to climate despair

    • Lyn Bender
    • 13 December 2012
    21 Comments

    The Doha climate talks have come and gone, and it is all business as usual. Actually, it is full steam ahead with coal, despite dire warnings from the World Bank that if we don't turn down the heat we face clear threats to our great god, The Economy. While denial and despair are tempting options at this point, there are healthier ways to respond.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fourth grade Jesus envy

    • Brian Doyle
    • 29 August 2012
    7 Comments

    I remember Maureen McArdle's neck in front of me in the third row, that smug smarmy neck gloating and preening as she bested me in maths and social studies and science, receiving one gold Jesus after another, whereas I earned a series of silver Jesuses as long as your arm. 'At least it is not a bronze Jesus,' my mum actually said once.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What's the point of the Olympics?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 01 August 2012
    16 Comments

    The games are an escapist spectacle, where the flags of Iran, Palestine and Syria flutter without irony alongside those of the US, Israel and Turkey, and delegates from Spain and Greece wave as if their nation's economies have not fractured the Eurozone. The dissonance between the games and reality has become hard to ignore.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Teen girl's post-traumatic guilt trip

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 21 June 2012
    2 Comments

    A self-absorbed teenager contributes to the road death of a pedestrian, then seeks to assuage her guilt without actually accepting responsibility. One teacher attemps to mentor the girl in her dilemma but is too accepting of her flirtatious advances to be considered a disinterested advisor.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    If Clive Palmer was a High Court judge

    • Patrick McCabe
    • 21 May 2012
    20 Comments

    Imagine Attorney-General Nicola Roxon appoints Palmer as the newest High Court judge. Justice Palmer sets about rewriting the law in radical ways, freeing mining companies from regulation and approving disbanding the Australian Greens. Surely such an appointment could be challenged? Actually, no.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Letter from a lost soldier

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 April 2012
    5 Comments

    'I wish this war was finished for I am fed up. My dear Ann, you and the children try to be as cheery as you can. I feel all buggered up but I shall just have to carry on the best way I can ... we are on another front now and it is actually hell ...' Whatever ambiguous solace Annie could derive from Alex's letter, it was soon lost.

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