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Keywords: Essay

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

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Giving stick to incipient police violence

    • Brian Doyle
    • 01 May 2013
    5 Comments

    A nightstick doesn't sound fearsome, but when you see one up close you respect the inherent violence of the thing. I stared at it for a while, contemplating how a burly policeman with his feet set could deliver a cracking blow to a head or a shoulder or an arm flung across your face to protect your eyes and brains.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A modest solution to Morrison's asylum seeker woes

    • Brian Matthews
    • 26 April 2013
    9 Comments

    If the Shadow Minister for Immigration had read Swift's satirical essay 'A Modest Proposal', a new front in his asylum seeker campaign would have opened up. Spurning Nauru, all he has to do is channel asylum seekers into hunting-specified NSW parks and reserves and let Barry O'Farrell's hunters do the rest.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Did Australian authorities do enough to try to save asylum seeker lives?

    • Tony Kevin
    • 16 April 2013
    8 Comments

    We now have another distressing and perplexing case of possible Australian failure properly to use intelligence information to save lives. If the unnamed agency that briefed AMSA did have the relevant coordinates, and yet did not pass them to AMSA to pass to BASARNAS, it could be complicit in the deaths of up to 58 people last week.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Party games in darkening Canberra

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 22 March 2013
    10 Comments

    Our political leaders are suffering from the disenchantment of the electorate. Canberra and its political hackery has less appeal now than it's had for a long time. It might be worth listening to Bob Hawke, who recently unwittingly echoed the seniment of French philosopher Simone Weil's essay 'On the Abolition of All Political Parties'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nothing romantic about living in squalor

    • Ellena Savage
    • 15 March 2013
    5 Comments

    The Arts Minister Simon Crean's new Creative Partnerships initiative is another more-of-the-same, fund-career-administrators-and-educators-and-leave-artistes-to-their-hellish-squalor kind of model. Art can be a satisfying occupation, but artists cannot live on self-satisfaction alone.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A wild new pope

    • Barry Gittins, Brian Doyle and B. A. Breen
    • 12 March 2013
    8 Comments

    Man, yeah, I would be pope, if the phone rang, late at night, collect from the Vatican. Yes, I would, if I could do it right. I'd call a meeting of the Curia and say boys, we are letting women run everything for the next five years. Each of you gets a new boss in high heels.

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  • RELIGION

    Pope for a polarised Church

    • James McEvoy
    • 11 March 2013
    6 Comments

    Traditionalists turn to the leadership for tighter control over doctrine, liturgy and practice. Progressives look to the leadership for removal of constraints in the same areas. The Church needs a pope with an engaged, open stance, sensitive to the struggles of contemporary seekers and not pushing pat answers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The extraordinary sandwiches of Sister Cook

    • Brian Doyle
    • 27 February 2013
    12 Comments

    Many a man has written elegiacally or bitterly of his education under the firm hands of the Sisters, but not so many have sung the quiet corners where perhaps we were better educated than we were in our classrooms. I learned more about communion at the epic timbered table in Sister Cook's golden kitchen than I did in religion class. 

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  • RELIGION

    Ratzinger and Rowan Williams side by side

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 14 February 2013
    21 Comments

    Now that Williams has returned to academic life and Ratzinger has resigned, it is tempting to commit both their reigns to the category of failure, and debate mostly the nobility or otherwise of their inability to bend lurching structures or less gifted minds to their own wills. This would not, however, be the whole picture in either case.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Election year food, sex and meaning

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 08 February 2013

    David Marr's withering piece on Tony Abbot completes the political trinity. These writers manage the impossible: they have me feeling sorry for politicians. Well, almost. I'm not sure if such magnanimity is allowed in an election year. But what a pleasure to discover those grey Canberran corridors harbouring such a chiaroscuro of emotion.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    NSW Labor's diseased ethics

    • Tony Smith
    • 06 February 2013
    11 Comments

    The Labor Party's ethical problems are deep seated. Once it adopted pragmatism as its first principle, policy debates lost meaning. The ideological vacuum was filled by enslavement to poll driven politics and media images. The Left struggled to retain its influence and Labor's heart vanished. We should expect much more from our politicians.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A fine teacher's urination solution

    • Brian Doyle
    • 30 January 2013
    11 Comments

    Sister Marie realised that Linda had been robbed of her lunch, and had not eaten at all, and had been humiliated by the theft, and was more humiliated now by public revelation. She straightened up and stared at the older kids, but just as she began to speak, Linda sobbed even harder, and a rill of urine trickled from the back of her seat.

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