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Keywords: Lucky Country

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Royal baby's semi-charmed life

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 24 July 2013
    15 Comments

    For all the intrusions this tiny prince will have to endure in the years that stretch ahead, there will exist, as a salve of sorts, the incalculable benefits that his social status has randomly afforded him. We shouldn't diminish the joy of the royal couple, but we should be wary of allowing our sustained and fawning attention to further entrench the idea that some people are inherently more valuable than others.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Spare a thought for luckless Gillard

    • Moira Rayner
    • 27 June 2013
    37 Comments

    Anyone who knows how it feels to lose a career in mid life will understand how Gillard is feeling today. Now that a most gracious acknowledgement of personal defeat has been given by the first woman to step up to the hardest political job anyone could be asked to do, we must find the time to consider and learn from what we have witnessed about how the country is run.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Boys using violence to impress girls

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 30 May 2013

    Some lessons need to be learned more than once. A young boy punches an older peer in defence of the honour of a girl he admires. The girl is so impressed that she invites the boy on a date. Is violence, then, an approved medium for the defence of romantic ideals? The boy tests this premise twice more, with less gratifying results. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Getting a grip on our asylum seeker whingeing

    • Caz Coleman
    • 13 May 2013
    20 Comments

    It has been embarrassing to sit in on meetings of the UNHCR recently and be asked by other countries' delegates why Australia is so worried about its relatively small number of asylum arrivals. We need to take a broader perspective on this issue and, rather than complain, learn how to better manage arrivals. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Christmas Island capsize demands coronial inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 March 2013
    39 Comments

    The details of the event as so far publicly known suggest seriously life-threatening negligent process. No one would have died if this unnecessary and, on the face if it, unprofessional halt and boarding had not taken place. No amount of blaming the asylum seekers' poor seamanship can get around that fact.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Assange tests British diplomatic principle

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 August 2012
    21 Comments

    Julian Assange sits securely in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, as Cardinal József Mindszenty did for years inside the US Embassy in Communist-ruled Hungary. This is a benefit of the Vienna Convention. If Britain violated this principle by storming or cutting off utilities to the Embassy, the diplomatic protection of its officials and their families around the world would be weakened immediately.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Interviewing Peter Steele for America Magazine

    • Jim McDermott
    • 04 July 2012

    About four years ago I had the great pleasure to spend four days with Peter Steele while he was at Georgetown. Hearing that he had died, I went back to those interviews, hours and hours we spent on things like the first time he read Billy Collins, growing up in Perth, unexpected blessings, and the never-ending catalogue of characters and words that fascinated and delighted him. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Accidental white heroes of Aboriginal culture

    • Dean Ashenden
    • 25 May 2012
    5 Comments

    A Yankunytjajara elder has damned a current 'songlines' anthropological  study, declaring that 'white do-gooders need their boundaries defined'. Anthropologists, like missionaries, have a mixed record, but are credited by many Aboriginal people for doing more good than they intended or anticipated.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Getting personal with Anzac Day

    • Philip Harvey
    • 25 April 2012
    16 Comments

    Should I even be saying all this to people I have never met? What do I say? How far do I go? My paternal grandfather, Edgar, was not only an Anzac but among those who landed nearly 100 years ago at the Turkish cove. Even among my family his experiences are still largely passed over in silence.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Greens moral vision safe in Milne's hands

    • Tony Kevin
    • 19 April 2012
    28 Comments

    Retiring Greens leader Bob Brown is not the avuncular teddy-bear politician some paint him as. He and new leader Christine Milne share the same steel and political acumen. The next promising generation of Greens leaders will be nurtured and grow under Milne's leadership. And there are many of them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Songs and stories of Sri Lanka's war

    • Martin Mulligan
    • 23 November 2011
    5 Comments

    After a meal cooked in the distinctive Jaffna way, the multi-talented Professor treated us to a repertoire of his own songs about his mother, victims of the 2004 tsunami, and those who had suffered during the war. Songs and stories of lived experience, translated into all the languages of Sri Lanka, might achieve more than the government's Reconciliation Commission.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Unemployment angels and demons

    • John Falzon
    • 19 October 2011
    8 Comments

    Recently I received an email from a young man in Queensland. He was writing to thank the St Vincent de Paul Society for the stance it takes on the side of people who are demonised for being unemployed. He told me his story. Here are some bits of it.

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