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Keywords: Essay

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia complicit in PNG's Bougainville blight

    • Ellena Savage
    • 02 August 2013
    1 Comment

    Even more disturbing than PNG's poverty and gender-based violence is its military and police human rights record. Evidence of abuses in the form of a military blockade, massacres, rape and torture during the Bougainville Crisis of the 1990s are well-documented. The history of this crisis reveals PNG as incapable of caring for its most vulnerable citizens due to systemic corruption.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We're all boat people after all

    • Brian Doyle
    • 31 July 2013
    7 Comments

    Boat people, job thieves, welfare cheats — I've heard the insults, and the greed, fear and incipient blood behind those words. Rather than snarl at the crude selfishness behind our national fear of immigrants, I stare at my family annals, and read about the lanky children who came here from Ireland, utterly poor, desperately hungry, and ferociously eager.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Portrait of an empty marriage and absent God

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 July 2013
    2 Comments

    The sense of God as absent is almost suffocating, but is relieved by the hope that if God is absent from buildings and institutions he may be present 'outside' and in relationships. Father Quintana comes into his own when he comes into contact with the needs of ordinary people, as he prays in voiceover 'Christ before me … behind me' and so on.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Moved and confused by church in a tent

    • Brian Doyle
    • 09 July 2013
    6 Comments

    Religions are mesmerised and ruined by power but always pregnant with the possibility of humility. They are so easy to ignore. You'd be wise to sneer, with every reason imaginable for the curl of your knowing lip. Yet here I am, on Sunday morning, in the wedding reception tent, agog; not so much at the earnest idiot of a minister, but at everyone, sweetly, else.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Husic feels the chill of Australia's racist winter

    • Ellena Savage
    • 05 July 2013
    11 Comments

    The media response to the racial abuse Ed Husic suffered after the Qur'an affair in Parliament was as troubling as the abuse itself. Labor MP Stephen Jones called Husic an immigration success story. I wonder what an immigration disaster story would look like. Perhaps the British-descendent bullies who spat on a 14-year-old, headscarved girl in 2004.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Egyptian democracy a long way off

    • Evan Ellis
    • 05 July 2013
    3 Comments

    President Mohamed Morsi did not govern particularly well. Egypt's rating on the Failed State Index has slipped from 45 to 34 since the fall of Mubarak. But the truth is that this crisis was not merely 12 months in the making, and Egypt's democracy was merely grafted on to a structure in which the military was the real power.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My brother's hat mourns his death

    • Brian Doyle
    • 19 June 2013
    6 Comments

    If you were a familiar Irish cap, and had waited all night every night for 30 years for the blessing of the morning when he'd reach for you, knead you and fold you gently over his ungovernable hair, wouldn't you wonder where he was the first few days after he vanished, and feel something like a silent sadness?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Obama no 'wuss' but at what cost to Syria?

    • Evan Ellis
    • 18 June 2013
    4 Comments

    Alluding to his own military style intervention in Kosovo, Bill Clinton warned Obama not to look like a 'wuss' on Syria. Still, Obama's decision to start providing arms to Syrian rebels is an enormous risk. Australia's history of state interventions to tackle Indigenous disadvantage provide surprisingly apt criteria for evaluating the decision.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Sex is to pregnancy what racism is to genocide

    • Ellena Savage
    • 07 June 2013
    10 Comments

    This past fortnight, race has been high on the agenda. Can a 13-year-old be racist? Is what Eddie McGuire said racist? Meanwhile, revelations that police officers in one Melbourne suburb had printed and distributed 50 racist stubby holders hinted at a frightening culture of racialised violence. The reality is that racial violence is inextricable from racist language.

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  • RELIGION

    Church and ordained ministry in the 21st century

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 May 2013
    2 Comments

    Fr Frank Brennan's keynote address at the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn Clergy Assembly, St Clement's, Gaylong, on 22 May 2013

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  • MEDIA

    Catholic communicators navigating new media

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 07 May 2013
    1 Comment

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Abbott's animal charms

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 03 May 2013
    5 Comments

    Casting a Victorious PM Abbott as a puppet of Pell and Howard, or a fiddler with women's rights, seems risible; Abbott is bound by social restraints after all. Nonetheless, there is something ominous in David Marr's droll observation: 'His values have never stood in his way.'

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