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Keywords: Hawk

  • AUSTRALIA

    Why the choice revolution let us down: In conversation with Mark Considine

    • David Halliday
    • 28 February 2024
    1 Comment

    The main purpose of government is to promote the welfare of its people. And yet over the last few decades, through numerous inquiries, it’s become clear that the Australian government has failed to provide services for the Australian population as well as might be expected. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Murugappan family and the cynicism of refugee politics

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 June 2021
    27 Comments

    The Murugappan family have found themselves in the middle of this nasty tangle, their fates politicised and manipulated.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Messiness unleashed by the attack on Saudi oil

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 16 September 2019
    9 Comments

    All of this has the hallmarks of danger. Previous US administrations have been cavalier with using stretched evidence, to justify military action. The region still labours with the fantasies that drove the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The dangers of misreading also extend to the cognitive failings of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Bob Hawke's post Tiananmen legacy

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 30 May 2019
    4 Comments

    The events of 4 June 1989 in Beijing were horrific, but then prime minister Hawke's leadership and the skills, passion and sacrifice of the generation of Chinese that stayed in Australia in Tiananmen Square's aftermath have consequently made Australia a more vibrant society.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Revisiting Iola Mathews' feminist battlegrounds

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 May 2019
    5 Comments

    To anyone pressing for social change after the recent election, the Hawke years must seem as far removed as Camelot. Iola Mathews describes the personal and political struggle involved in pressing for any reform. It is a timely book.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hawkie, for whom I'd have faced cannon fire

    • Moira Rayner
    • 19 May 2019
    2 Comments

    I told one of my fiercely right-wing Kiwi uncles that if Bob Hawke were elected leader of the ALP I'd follow him through cannon-fire, and surprisingly won his (grudging) respect. For he was a man's man, and so was my then hero.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Winter road trip to the China-Russian border

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 06 March 2019

    Any tourist to this spot presumably stands in awe under the character, having crossed the full delineation of Chinese territory, and then gazes out over the Heilongjiang to Russia on the other side. North: them. Here: us. Cue national pride.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stephen Hawking as saint and celebrity

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 15 March 2018
    22 Comments

    The rush to pay tribute to the cosmological colossus had an air of reflex about it. People paid respects, but many were not entirely sure why. He'd be missed, but in what way? Such is the way of celebrity, even those rare intellectual ones who burst the barrier of mass marketing. They become symbols in their time, ciphers of an age.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ending poverty is a human challenge, not a technical one

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 October 2017
    7 Comments

    The difficulty inherent in the metaphor of eradication is that it sees poverty as a discrete object that exists independently of the people whom it affects, and that can be dealt with by devising technical solutions. It ignores the complex sets of relationships that constitute poverty as a human reality.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Striking Syria and the vagueness of humanitarian intervention

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 10 April 2017
    5 Comments

    Absent a Security Council resolution, the US had operated independently, adopting a policing and punitive stance against the Assad regime. 'This action,' House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted, 'was appropriate and just.' If humanitarian intervention is supposedly engineered to punish a regime in breach of obligations to protect the civilian population, it starts looking, all too often, like an act of regime change. At what point is the distinction on such matters as proportion or necessity even credible?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A few hot days in the Flinders Ranges

    • John Cranmer
    • 07 November 2016
    1 Comment

    Have you ever noticed the way that book and reality sometimes entwine and become essentially one? It's happening here and now as we contemplate these few hot days in Hawker and the Flinders. Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way creates a context for living here at this particular ephemeral moment. Altiplano Mexico in all it's barren frugality integrates with these hot and marginal plains hemmed in by the cragginess of surrounding scarplands with their many strong stories

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The man who sank the myth of controlled nuclear warfare

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 18 October 2016
    2 Comments

    The late Professor Desmond Ball of the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre came as close as any on being a public intellectual on nuclear strategy. While some of his counterparts in the US felt that using nuclear weapons was feasible and sound, Ball issued his pieces with mighty caveats. 'Controlling escalation', Ball ventured, 'requires both adversaries to exercise restraint, and current US policy is to offer a ... mixture of self-interest and coercion.'

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